The Pandemic is Replacing Lawyers with Robots Faster Than Ever

Covid-19 isn´t just causing trials to be remote, now it is accelerating the replacement of lawyers too.

Legal tech companies have been growing fast for the last decade and this year it has gone up another notch. A lot of the manual labor done by interns and junior lawyers is automatable. However, small and medium law firms have been conservative in their approach using AI. Now that almost every law firm, big or small, has been forced to deal with managing a remote workforce many have looked at AI to help.

Using AI to perform tasks normally done by a lawyer is nothing new. A major success story of the last five years has been the introduction of advanced contract automation. Helping lawyers to make custom, high-quality contracts in just five minutes by using a decision tree. Another major upset in legal circles was LawGeex AI outperforming 20 top lawyers in finding flaws in non-disclosure agreements. The AI had a stunning 94 percent accuracy rate, while the lawyers were only at 85%. Moreover, the AI only took 26 seconds to analyze the complete NDA. Lawyers on average took 92 minutes. In other words, in the time it takes for a lawyer to assess one NDA, the AI analyzes 212 and does it more accurately too.

An example of the recent replacement of lawyers by AI is JP Morgan’s commercial-loan agreements automatization. In just minutes the AI can review thousands of commercial-loan agreements saving up to 360 000 hours annually for lawyers. Small law firms too are turning to a myriad of software solutions. Increasing both revenues while driving down costs for clients. While fully replacing lawyers with robots is still a long way off, cooperation between man and machine has proven itself to be beneficial in the legal field, for now.