Posted by Phil Ayton
January 11, 2017

In 2016 we heard a lot about Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and self-driving cars.  As the year wore on it reached a fever pitch in the summer with article after article discussing the mass job losses and how society needs to learn to cope under our new robot overlords.

As the year drew to a close the tone changed slightly as VR headsets became available and weren’t quite as good as people hoped.  Toyota’s announcement that they were planning big investments in self-driving tech in the summer were replaced by quotes of “we are years away” from this type of product.  And the use of the phrase A.I. has given way to people talking about the slightly more prosaic “automation”.  This isn’t unusual as people have been getting excited about AI around once a decade since the 60’s in much the same way as the periodic fervour around outsourcing, or 3D TV’s.

What has remained constant though is the rise of the machines replacing the more basic tasks of people.  This form of automation is simply taking what a human does and programming it into a robot.  Already this year Foxconn, the makers of the iPhone, have announced that they are replacing nearly all their human assemblers with robots.  They currently employ 1.2 million people.  A recent academic study believes 47% of all jobs in the US will be automated away in the next 20 years.

These figures relate to the gradual increase in automation rather than the magical AI that’s going to suddenly do all our work for us.

So how does automation affect law firms?  Around 80% of the work done by lawyers in large full service law firms is transactional.  Transactional work involves collecting facts and using these to make decisions and create documents.  Does that sound like something that can be automated?  Well to automate this type of work you need to get the lawyer to program the automation – not something lawyers are that good at.  Lawyers also probably don’t want to spend time working themselves out of a job.

However law firm automation, along with all other types of automation is coming so is it best to wait for the juggernaut to roll over you or get on-board as soon as possible? 

Phil Ayton is the founder and CEO of Sysero. His expertise lies in helping law firms drive greater productivity, ensure compliance and drive client service innovation through knowledge automation. Contact him at phil.ayton@sysero.com.