It would not be too sad to see computers replace lawyers, particularly in family law, but surely there are many areas where the analytical software programs increase efficiency and decrease costs. For example, “e-discovery” software analyzes documents in a fraction of the time it takes humans. Some programs can extract concepts and deduce patterns from millions of documents that the lawyers would miss. – Ilene
Excerpt (but read the whole thing):
These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.
David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.
“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”
Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.
“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”
Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.
Full article here: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software – NYTimes.com.
