“Law Is an Information Technology”

That’s the first line in a recent article from the Fordham Law Review by John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce, an article which I’ve added to my “must read” list.

There’s been a lot of talk about disruption and innovation in law practice. In “The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services,” the authors note that “the disruption has already begun” and take a look at “the weakening of lawyers’ market power over providing legal services.”

The article is presented in two parts:

“Part I describes the relentless growth of computer power in hardware, software, and data collection capacity. This Part emphasizes that machine intelligence is not a one-time event that lawyers will have to accommodate. Instead, it is an accelerating force that will invade an ever-larger territory and exercise a more firm dominion over this larger area. We then describe five areas in which machine intelligence will provide services or factors of production currently provided by lawyers: discovery, legal search, document generation, brief generation, and prediction of case outcomes.”

“Part II discusses how these developments may create unprecedented competitive pressures in many areas of lawyering. This Part further shows that bar regulation will be unable to stop such competition. Because bar regulation will be ineffective, we expect an age of unparalleled innovation in legal services, as startups compete to deliver important components of legal tasks in new ways.”

Looking forward to giving this a closer read once I’ve finished preparations for the upcoming Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference in Winnipeg starting next weekend.

The confluence, the confluence!