Middlemen are dying left and right. Technology is making them obsolete, redundant.
One way technology does this is by breaking down communication and travel barriers. It is easier to communicate with someone across the world. It easier to transport large volumes of goods across the world.
Another way technology does this is by automation. On today’s assembly lines, machines put together cars as much as people do. Computer programs, such as those that help us pay our taxes, automate processes that once took tax consultants. I can sit in the comfort of my own home and listen to a computer program help pick out the best deductions for me instead of sitting in a chair in some strip-mall office while listening to a tax preparer give me the same advice.
All of this does not bode well for the middlemen of the world — technology and machines are taking their jobs.
Lawyers are middlemen. Not all of our activities are replaceable by machines or computers. I would not take my courtroom cues from King & Spalding’s Online Personal Courtroom Companion. There is a certain subjective, non-analytical feel to a courtroom no computer could ever detect.
Nevertheless, lawyers and their clients already rely on machines for other legal tasks. Contracts, bankruptcies, pleading preparation, wills, real estate — these are all areas where computer-assisted document preparation is regular and expected. Fill in a few forms and the divorce complaint is prepared. Tick a few boxes and the will is done. Put some numbers in the computer and out comes the necessary bankruptcy documents.
Paper jockey lawyers may bemoan this technological encroachment. Worse, technology is improving to where machines may become capable of performing document review. The billable time for which lawyers who primarily draft, revise, and review documents is dropping.
Courtroom jockeys may rejoice, believing they are being unshackled from onerous discovery and pleading requirements. These lawyers may feel that technology will allow them to recapture their time and expend it on their true love — the courtroom.
Indeed, Richard Susskind has been on the forefront of these developments. He has written a new book called The End of Lawyers.1 It deals with the reality that legal services are becoming more streamlined, more agile, and more cost effective. The profit margins lawyers can achieve by providing legal services will shrink as law becomes more commoditized.
A more daunting threat to lawyers is not the erosion of the time it takes to prepare legal services, but rather the erosion of the need for legal services period.
This is epitomized by Code and other laws of Cyberspace,2 a book written by Lawrence Lessig. One of the ideas Mr. Lessig imparts to his readers is that, in cyberspace, code is law. Code sets the boundaries as to what can be done. If code does not want a seller to be able to renege on a transaction once it begins, then code can prevent the seller from reneging.
Code as law has begun to bleed over into the real world. Checks are used less and less frequently in lieu of the more convenient ‘check card.’ Transaction wise, code dictates how transactions occur for online transaction sites such as eBay.
The two examples above possess code that is informed by the current law of financial transactions and market transactions. Even so, there is no real reason why their code must follow the law beyond, possibly, the legal requirement. Already the code of check cards is changing so that users can choose to have a certain amount of money transferred to a savings account for each purchase they make. Similarly, the common law of sales has adapted so that the automated bidding process of eBay provides buyers and sellers with certain duties and expectations.
Technology has the ability to erase these areas of law. With the continued decline of check writing, American law students may no longer be forced to sit through painful classes like Payment Systems that go over the sometimes arcane Uniform Commercial Code rules for commercial paper. Similarly, as technology advances the security and certainty behind a sales transaction, the underlying contract may become less and less needed.
In this way, lawyers are facing the same problems of any middleman. The erosion of need in both service, as it becomes commodified, and field, as it becomes obsolete, will kill off both classic middlemen and classic lawyers. Richard Susskind predicts lawyers will face new job realities, and I believe he is right.
In the end, though, there will always be lawyers. Technology has impacted the profession many times in the past, but it has always adapted to meet new needs. This, of course, does not mean these changes will not be painful.
- I have not yet read this book, although it is on the way for Christmas. [↩]
- The updated Code v.2 may be found here: http://codev2.cc/ [↩]
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