Digital White Papers

53 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Let's Stop with the Robot-Lawyer Memes one or two square miles in urban areas and fewer in rural areas). With the computer networks that enabled ATMs, banks could expand their number of branches enormously. Today, it seems as though a Bank of America or Chase branch can be found on every block in most cities, plus most shopping malls in suburban and rural areas. Those branches have created a need for more bank tellers, branch managers, loan officers and other support positions. The jury is still out on whether other industries and jobs have been positively or negatively affected by digital technology. While travel agents may have lost work to online booking sites, such as Travelocity, Kayak and Expedia, today more people travel because online booking is so easy. Many travelers choose to work with expert travel agents for certain types of travel such as safaris and eco-tours; these travelers spend more money, earning their travel agents greater commissions. Convince Attorneys That Tech Will Help Them What do these examples of technological disruption have to do with lawyers and the legal industry? They suggest that we need to stop talking about technology replacing lawyers, eliminating their roles in delivering critical client services and threatening the structure of the legal industry as we know it. Remember, you cannot convince people to do anything — adopt new processes, use new technology or change their behavior — when their economic self-interest tells them they should continue doing what always worked in the past. Persuading aorneys who make very comfortable incomes under a rewarding compensation system that their service delivery model is broken and must change would be difficult at best. Harder still would be persuading them to change because you have a new technology that can do their job beer. Even if you are right about the technology, you can bet they will resist and, as the business owners, make certain your technology or improved process is never adopted. Instead, we should emphasize how technology is an enabler, not a threat to their jobs and profession. To achieve this, we need to present innovations as sustainable technologies — ones that foster improved performance — and not as disruptive technologies — ones that entirely upend the current business model. (Clayton Christensen drew the distinction between sustainable and disruptive technologies in his must-read classic, "The Innovator's Dilemma.") In my 30-plus years practicing law, I have seen enormous changes in the technology we use to serve our clients. When I started practicing, we handwrote or dictated our briefs and memos, mailed our correspondence to our clients while retaining carbon copies, and researched case law in books housed in massive libraries. At no point do I recall anyone telling us that the new online legal research services, Lexis and Westlaw, would replace or reduce the need for lawyers. Instead, we were told that these tools would help us serve clients more effectively and research law more efficiently. While I have seen no definitive research on point, I must assume that the advent and acceptance of online legal research drastically reduced the hours aorneys could bill to their clients for legal research. It might also have slightly reduced the number of associates that firms needed to hire. But would anyone really want to return to the days of Shepardizing citations with books and combing through mountains of digests to find cases? Similarly, ediscovery tools such as Concordance and Relativity and, more recently, predictive coding and technology-assisted review Artificial intelligence, automated contract review, expert systems and blockchain- based smart contracts are of technological significance far greater than fax machines, email and online legal research services were.

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