Introduction

Besides the law, many other professions and professionals have concerns about being replaced by modern technologies in certain aspects of doing their jobs. This concern, while valid, has its pros and cons. Modern technology has indeed replaced a good number of manual jobs in many professions, thereby rendering the need for physical human input unnecessary. However, this has also led to completing jobs at much faster rates, which has led to more productivity and improved economies.

Replacing lawyers may be a concern, but it remains a reality far from happening with regards to legal practice at this period in time. While the profession has experienced its fair share of improvements through modern technological tools (which can be found on platforms like Loio, replacing lawyers poses a more complex and complicated reality. This article expatiates further on the subject matter below:

Nature of the profession

The multifaceted nature of law is one of the main reasons why the notion of modern technologies replacing lawyers remains a far cry from current reality. The legal practice involves many actions and processes that go into completing a finished work. These actions include preparing drafts of documents, endorsing court processes, conducting investigations on the property title, formulating written arguments, deposing witnesses, and appearing in court on behalf of parties. The steps involved in completing many of these tasks contain specific human activities, which cannot be performed by any existing modern technologies.

In addition, in many countries, only lawyers are permitted to perform certain actions. Some of these actions include registration of companies, preparation of court processes, and landed property documents, among others. The reason for these laws is that lawyers are expected to apply their years of learning and studying the law to these tasks, in order to perform them properly.

Assistants, not replacements

If any replacements have been done by modern technologies like AI and similar innovations in the legal profession, it is to serve as capable assistants for legal practitioners. That way, the jobs being replaced are not lawyers’ jobs, but paralegals, to a certain extent. Modern technologies ranging from Microsoft Office tools to document automation software – which speed up creating and editing documents – have aided lawyers in completing tasks on a rate that was never possible before the introduction of these technologies. Other functions like file storage, research and file transfer have also been improved at a geometric rate by modern technologies. However, for all the advantages they bring, their functions are limited to making lawyers more efficient at their jobs through their quick processing features.

Continued relevance

Either in research, storage, document creation, editing, calculation, billing or file transfer, modern technologies continue to become more relevant in the legal profession, just like any other. Many tools used by lawyers in making their jobs more excellent are not specifically legal tools by design. They however fit perfectly into assisting lawyers in completing and perfecting purely legal tasks. This signifies the global importance of these technologies, and how they will continue to be of relevance to lawyers as they develop. On this subject, Tom Girardi, a renowned civil litigation attorney says “it may even be considered legal malpractice not to use AI one day”, and adds that “it would be analogous to a lawyer in the late twentieth century still doing everything by hand when this person could use a computer”.

Conclusion

Lawyers are not to be replaced by modern technologies anytime soon. However, the legal profession itself is to be drastically affected by it. In the coming years, modern technologies will change the speed at which lawyers work, the rate of acquiring information, solving criminal cases, and uncovering evidence as a whole. Most experts do not predict an outright replacement of professionals in the years to come. However, there will be an exponential growth in the general productivity and revenue increase of technologically savvy lawyers.