Will AI Render Litigators Obsolete?
Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Law (Part 3)
If clients could know the likely outcome of nearly any dispute within a small statistical range, will they still need litigators?
For example, let’s imagine a $5 million breach of contract dispute. The parties feed all of the data into IBM’s Watson and receive a printout predicting “There’s an 87% chance that a jury verdict in this case will be $1.5-$1.7 million.” With that data, they’re not going to war over $5 million; they’re arguing over $200,000. That’s a dispute the companies can resolve themselves without needing law firms to go to full-on combat for them. Here’s a link to an excerpt of my Artificial Intelligence presentation where I discuss some of these issues.
If computers can predict outcomes better, will clients still hire lawyers?
Why hire a $1,000/hour big-firm expert if a small-town solo practitioner can boast even greater overall expertise when their skills are augmented by readily available technology?
In a head-to-head competition, AI software battled top lawyers to predict the likely outcome of 800 decided cases, and the technology beat the lawyers handily, 87% to 62%. (See “Artificial Intelligence Beats Big Law Partners in Legal Matchup”). Wow. That’s big.
That just might be the legal profession’s “Jeopardy” moment.
Click below to watch the 5-minute excerpt:
There will be winners and losers.
The question you should be asking yourself is — if your firm isn’t aggressively seeking to adapt, which group are you likely to be in?
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