Opinion #13 - 5 years from now (3/3)

Welcome everyone!

After post 1/3 and 2/3 this week, let´s get into the last part of my views on the future of law practice following this post. I want to talk about 3 last topic that are somehow related.

a. Predictive: can law be predictive? I am certain that some procedures or analysis of certain tasks that the lawyers does can be predictive. However, special on litigation, the specifics of the case has to be analysed, not only with the law on the hand, but also with the emotional intelligence necessary to evaluate certain human facts of every case. We need to be careful with that.

b. Accessible: a predictive system means faster, and faster means cheaper, and cheaper means accessible. It is true that in some countries litigation can only be affordable by the richer. However, the analysis of the certain aspects of the law is always complex and it requires experience and time, and that costs money. I hardly think that it is going to change...however...

This article in Bloomberg talks about how JP Morgan managed to automate up to 360,000 of legal work. It seem obvious to me that, specially in due diligence processes, machines can help. They will be able to find the main terms of a contract, index it and make it available in a data base where you just have to type "change of control" and it will let you know which contracts include such provision and where exactly to make easy the review.

I am almost certain that they will be able to tell you if this or that clause is not following market practices or even recommend some additional working to be more "pro-lender" or "pro-borrower".

However, I don't think that Artificial Intelligence, at least in the next 5 years, will substitute a single minute of the valuable judgement, experience and business acumen of a good lawyer. Less lawyers will be needed, but a good mind will always be able to analyse everything with better perspective.

What do you think?

T

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