Industries Ripe For Disruption: The End Of Low-Level Lawyering
Kidding! Let’s not kill all of them. Some of my best friends are lawyers, and they can be extremely handy. As a journalist, I would prefer to keep some around for interviews — they are so precise and eloquent.
Even so, new technological developments make it seem likely that there are far too many of them. Innovations in the way the legal industry processes and sorts data could put thousands of low-level lawyers out of a job in the next few years.
It all goes back to a process called “discovery,” which is a defining trait of the American legal system. In the US, a party in a civil lawsuit can demand that its opponent share relevant e-mails, answer written questions under oath, even undergo a medical examination before the trial. This pre-trial discovery process aims to encourage the disclosure of all information relevant to the case, in order to increase the chance that the truth will come out in court.
In the days of yore (before the internet, pictured below), this information took the form of letters, memos, and other pieces of paper packed into dozens of filing boxes. Some young, lowly associate would have to sort through the documents one by one, decide if they were relevant to the case, and share them with the opposing counsel.
Yet – and this is the crazy part – the way lawyers sort through all this information remains pretty low-tech. Firms generally use some software to filter documents, but most of the work is still done by humans. To keep costs under control, firms now export the reviewing process to “contract reviewers,” armies of otherwise-unemployed lawyers who click through 50-100 documents per hour for up to 12 hours a day.
In cases where information security, attorney-client privilege, and logistics aren’t an obstacle, some firms are outsourcing the work, turning to English-speaking lawyers in countries like India and the Philippines. Junior attorneys in India can make about $8,200 per year – a rate not even South Carolina can beat.
Even with these armies of low-paid humans, however, the cost of reviewing documents continues to spiral upward along with the amount of data to be reviewed. Document review accounts for over 70% of the total costs of discovery, and some claim that the process is now so expensive that it prevents parties from litigating legitimate disputes.
Can’t we come up with something better?
Clearly, the legal industry is ripe for technological disruption. And it is on the cusp of it, thanks to something called predictive coding. Computer programs are increasingly able to “learn” desired traits and organize documents based on them, slashing the costs of manual review.
Predictive coding has clear advantages. First, the cost is substantially lower. Obviously, people still play a crucial role in this process: A highly skilled and trained lawyer must work with the computer program to “teach” it what constitutes a useful document. But electronic discovery vendors report that predictive coding can reduce the documents to be reviewed by 50-75 percent, and the overall costs by 70-85%.
In addition, computer programs are actually far more consistent than their human counterparts. Reviewers tend to apply inconsistent standards from document to document, and the problem is multiplied when a team of reviewers is used. Computers are also, obviously, much faster.
So why hasn’t predictive coding been adopted already? It is better suited for some situations than others: It’s more useful in cases involving large troves of documents, and it can only be used to review text, not pictures, databases, or spreadsheets. Another barrier is the lack of judicial decisions on predictive coding: A handful of courts have ruled that the use of predictive coding is acceptable, but more judicial decisions are needed before the technology is widely adopted. Finally, the legal industry seems to be moving slowly to adopt the technology, given that it will lose a substantial revenue stream.
The technology has big implications for improving the efficiency and lowering the cost of litigation. The sad part of the story, of course, is the number of already-low-paid lawyers who will soon find themselves without even the menial work of contract review. This change will only intensify the current oversupply of lawyers in the US. It’s hard to say exactly how many Americans will be affected, but the figure is at least in the thousands.