There is no shortage of talk about the importance of lawyers delegating legal work to other lawyers and paralegals. Despite that, I have always believed that lawyers should not delegate work that they do not know how to do themselves. I questioned how anyone can check the quality of work done by their law clerks or associates if they do not know what a good job looks like.
Of course, you also have to make sure that the people to whom you delegate know what they are doing.
So, first I learned how to do things, then I taught other people how to do them, and finally I delegated to them.
Then along comes A.I. Let’s suppose that senior lawyers start delegating as much as possible to A.I. and spending less time teaching the young folks how to do things. In a few years, we will have a generation of lawyers who are relying upon A.I. to do things that they do not know how to do themselves.
Does it matter?
I suppose that it will not matter at all if the A.I. is perfect. But what if it is not?
Imagine a day when you are being transported in an autonomous vehicle. The vehicle has manual controls which are never used. The A.I. makes a mistake and you are about to crash into an oncoming truck. You grab the wheel. If you are of my generation and know how to drive, you might succeed in avoiding a collision. But if you are from a future generation and were never taught to drive, perhaps you will be crushed.
What if legal A.I. is not that good? What if it omits a crucial clause from an agreement and you, having never drafted that type of agreement from scratch, do not notice that it is missing? That would be bad.
For the sake of discussion, let me suspend disbelief and assume that the A.I. will be perfect, and that the practice of teaching young lawyers to draft documents can be safely relegated to the dustbin of history. I am still concerned for those lawyers who will not be trained to do this stuff.
One of the things that made me a successful lawyer was my ability to draw upon my experience thoughtfully drafting thousands of documents. When I went into a meeting to discuss legal relationships, I could draw on all of my experience as to how legal concepts fit together, which to a large extent was developed thinking about how to fit them together in a document. I cannot imagine that I would have had the same depth of understanding if all of my documents had been spat out of a machine without me having been deeply engaged in their production. And as for those people who I mentored and trained, and to whom I explained what was good and bad about their drafting, and sent them back to try again, that is how they learned their craft.
I fear that A.I. will stand for “Abandoned Intelligence.” To quote Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood: “(I)… got a real good feelin’ somethin’ bad about to happen.”
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.