Robot lawyers lower the bar

The legal profession has been told it must fight to protect itself, and its clients, from automated online legal platforms.

President of the Law Society, Morry Bailes. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

The legal profession’s peak national body has warned that lawyers should not allow the provision of legal services to “slip through their fingers” and into the lap of unregulated online providers of legal information.

Law Council president Morry Bailes has endorsed concerns about the rise of automated online platforms that are blurring the line between the provision of legal information and legal services.

He warned that a number of unregulated providers of legal information were already active online and consumers were incapable of knowing whether the information they offered was accurate and current.

“The benefit of technology is that people might be able to learn more about their rights and entitlements,” Mr Bailes said.

“The danger of open-source information is that it might actually lead them up the wrong path.

“There is a genuine concern that we have to be careful about not allowing the law to slip through the fingers of the legal profession and into the lap of unregulated providers,” Mr Bailes told The Australian.

The challenge for the profession was to develop an approach to regulation that recognised how technology could address problems with access to justice but which would also protect consumers.

“Our concern is that there are unregulated online providers of legal information and, even though they might have some involvement by lawyers, they are not regulated as lawyers are in Australia,” Mr Bailes said.

He believed the law needed to embrace the use of artificial intelligence tools that enhanced the practice of law and had the potential to address unmet legal needs.

“However, at the same time we need to recognise it is a challenge for regulation both in permitting the legal profession to do certain things we may not currently permit ourselves to do, and to deal with unregulated providers,” Mr Bailes said.

His warning comes amid growing recognition within the profession that artificial intelligence and other forms of technology are triggering fundamental changes in the legal sector.

A report by LexisNexis warned last week that as AI becomes easier to apply to specific tasks, there is a growing trend towards automated legal platforms. The report, based on a survey of 264 legal professionals and a series of panel discussions, warned that these unregulated, low-cost, online services were a potential danger to consumers.

The LexisNexis report concluded that the growth of technology meant the legal sector was at the start of a period of technological disruption that was comparable to the industrial revolution.

Last Friday, two of the nation’s most senior judges warned that unless barristers became more cost-conscious and responsive to clients’ needs they risked being overtaken by technological change and artificial intelligence.

This warning was delivered before hundreds of barristers by High Court Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and NSW Chief Justice Tom Bathurst, who told a legal conference in Sydney barristers needed to adjust to the new reality.

“To survive, the legal profession and the Bar in particular may need to readjust its focus to skills such as critical thinking and persuasion that cannot easily be replaced by technological innovation,” Chief Justice Kiefel said. Chief Justice Bathurst issued a similar warning and said it was inconceivable that the courts and the legal system would remain immune from the technological transformation that had affected other professions.

He said many basic tasks in the legal sector had already been replaced by computation, automation and soft artificial intelligence and he predicted the Bar would eventually bear little resemblance to what it looked like at the turn of the century.

Their warnings at a conference in Sydney of the Australian Bar Association and the NSW Bar Association follow a survey of 243 law firms that found 63 per cent of the largest practices are considering using artificial intelligence for outsourced legal work within two years.

That survey, by legal technology company GlobalX and the Australian Legal Practice Management Association, also found another 19 per cent of firms of all sizes are planning to adopt AI “in the near future”.

The current edition of The Australian’s biannual legal magazine, The Australian Legal Review, also found that leading Australian law schools have overhauled their courses in order to meet surging demand from the profession for tech-savvy graduates.

Chief Justice Bathurst told last week’s conference that, while high-value complex work would probably continue in the conventional manner for some time, not all barristers were engaged in this type of work.

“Outside this niche are foreseeable and imminent changes, catalysed by both economic and structural forces,” he said. Bar­risters were operating in a “buyer’s market” and were under pressure to do more for less.

There was also little appetite for old-school inefficiencies.

Chief Justice Bathurst believed barristers were better placed to adapt to technological change than the rest of the profession but warned junior barristers were likely to be affected by technology-driven efficiencies at the NSW Supreme Court.

An Online Court was now available in the Supreme Court Equity Registrar’s Directions List and “further efficiencies will soon be created by transitioning most matters into the online court system and expanding the types of orders that can be made”.

“This will impact on junior barristers,” Chief Justice Bathurst warned.