COVER STORY
3
AI will
require human
judgment
to succeed
Professor Michael Legg and Dr Felicity Bell from the Law Society of NSW FLIP Stream
at UNSW Law are convinced the core characteristics of good lawyering will remain in
the future.
Good judgment and practical wisdom are
human qualities which cannot be replicated
by machines. At least for now, Legg and Bell
told the FLIP conference.
“One of the key things that unites lawyers
as a professional group is the concept of good
judgment or sound judgment,” Bell said.
“Sometimes that’s referred to as ‘practical
wisdom’.
“Good judgment can’t be captured by a
formula or a mechanical rule. It’s something
that has to respond in a particularised way to
a particular situation.
“As far as we can tell, that’s something that
is still unique to humans.”
Mark Cohen Esquire, the CEO of Legal
Mosaic, agreed, saying, “I don’t think tech is
going to replace lawyers. It is ushering a generation of service providers that had
new age.
“There are going to be a lot of new legal
positions that are going to open up and we
don’t even know what these jobs are going
to be, but we know that they are going to
be variations and combinations of different
themes that translate to work.”
Cohen said modern lawyers have had
to adapt to the “doing more with less”
mentality – a way of thinking that clients in
the post-2007 global financial crisis era have
embraced.
He pointed to this new business mantra
and the ways globalisation and the use of
smart-phones have changed how people
interact with the world as evidence of changes
to the “traditional legal buy-sell dynamic”.
p30-35_Cover Story.indd 4
Good judgment
“Law has morphed from a very lawyer- can’t be
centric, labour intensive, homogeneous law
firm-dominated guild to something very captured by
different,” Cohen said.
“It has become a digitised industry that a formula or
relies on technology to deliver legal services.”
Cohen pointed to Uber’s upending of the a mechanical
taxi industry as an example of how regulated
and established sectors could be quickly rule. As far
robbed of their market share if they did not
embrace change. as we can
He said alternative legal service providers
and the Big 4 accounting firms had been able tell, that’s
to do the same thing to traditional law firms
by giving clients control over who did the something that
legal work and how much of it.
He added that Uber was part of new is unique to
changed client expectations in terms of both humans.
cost and service transparency.
Economics could also help our FELICITY BELL
understanding about the nature of AI’s impact
on lawyers, Legg suggested. Referencing
research undertaken by a group of economic
experts from the University of Toronto in
Canada, he said reliance on human judgment
would increase as AI took over tasks that
required predictions.
“Judgment will be part of making the AI
work, but it will also be that you need that
human judgment in terms of the strategy,
the advice that is an important part of what
lawyers do,” Legg said. “The AI [should be
viewed] as an input into the human decision-
making process.”
ISSUE 50 I NOVEMBER 2018 I LSJ 33
24/10/18 4:47 pm