Susskind: Machines will replace lawyers if they deliver better outcomes

Clients value lawyers for the outcomes they deliver and will
switch to technology based alternatives if they produce the better
or cheaper results, Professor Richard Susskind has claimed.

The leading legal academic and technologist said his notion of
“outcome-thinking” applied to all professions; in the law, for
example, “litigants don’t want courts. They want their disputes
resolved fairly and with finality”.

In a short paper written for the British Academy, Professor
Susskind said: “The disconcerting message here for all
professionals is that our clients don’t want us. They want the
outcomes we bring.

“And when these outcomes can be reliably delivered in new ways
that are demonstrably cheaper, better, quicker or more convenient
than the current offering, we can expect the market to switch to
the alternatives.”

He acknowledged that many would balk at this. “They insist that
what a client surely needs, and will always need, is a trusted
adviser – an empathetic and expert human counsellor.

“But this is to confuse means with ends, to muddle up how we
work with what we deliver. It is to assume that there is something
intrinsically valuable, indispensable even, in our current ways of
working. It is to fixate on today’s processes and disregard our
broader telos (purpose or goal). I challenge this.”

While the work of many professionals was often admirable and
socially beneficial, he questioned whether their working practices
“in and of themselves are of such value that they should be
retained at all costs in the face of alternative services that
clients and customers find preferable”.

He continued: “I find myself, in other words, favouring the
interests of patients over doctors, of clients over lawyers, and of
students over teachers.”

Professor Susskind said many professionals countered this with
“task-based thinking”.

He explained: “They analyse the work they currently do, they
break it down into a set of component tasks, and then identify
those that they think might be undertaken by machines and those
that seem to be beyond the foreseeable capacities of the most
advanced systems.

“When they reckon that a significant proportion of their current
tasks cannot be taken on by machines, they feel safe. And their
task-based rationalisation is supported by most of the reports on
the future of work being published by academics and consultants,
and reproduced daily in the mainstream media.”

He argued that this approached was “deeply flawed”, using legal
work as an example.

“Commentators and practitioners often insist that much of the
work of lawyers is beyond the reach of technology. They will
suggest, for example, and not unreasonably, that the work of court
lawyers cannot be replaced by machines. How on earth could a robot
appear as an advocate before a judge?

“The answer, of course, is that we are light years from this
happening. But the story doesn’t end here, because these
traditionalists are asking and answering the wrong the
question.

“Mistakenly, they are focusing on current ways of working rather
than on whether the outcomes that court lawyers deliver might be
achieved in very different ways.

“Now consider online courts… The idea is that the final
decisions of the judges (still humans) will also be delivered in
electronic form. The outcome of the court (the binding decision) is
unchanged but the methods by which it is reached are transformed,
with the oral advocacy of court lawyers eliminated from the
process.”

It was, he said, “no comfort” that machines could not replicate
the work of advocates and deliver a “soaring closing argument” in
the courtroom. “The irreplaceability of the work of oral advocates
becomes an irrelevance.”

“In short, the systems that will replace us are unlikely to work
like us.”

This meant the big question about the future of work was not
whether machines could take on the work that humans do. “It is
whether the outcomes of today’s human labour can be delivered in
different ways with the support of technologies.

“Task-based analysis of the impact of machines, relying often on
the outdated distinction of labour economists between routine and
non-routine work, greatly understates the extent to which the work
of human beings will be taken on by AI.”

He concluded that, in an AI-enabled internet society, the
challenge was “to think deeply about our telos and find new ways to
deliver long-established outcomes.

“In the long term, we will find that these will increasingly
call for systems rather than traditional advisers.”

However, another well-known legal academic, Professor John
Flood, countered in a blog that “the single most important aspect
of the professional that Susskind has neglected is the role of the
trusted advisor”.

He said: “In a way such people don’t deliver outcomes. They
present views, interpretations, they make connections, they produce
ideas from left field. They counsel us because they have a world
view that exceeds ours. Without this we would be impoverished.”

“I know there is plenty wrong with professions. I have spent
many years discussing the legal profession in its forms. But I also
know, as an academic, that new graduates coming through earnestly
desire to improve the lives of others.”

Professor Flood, an English academic also working in Australia,
added: “We need to equip them to do that and also engage them in
discussions about the best ways to achieve their ends, not as a
calculus on a balance sheet, but in a way that continues to inspire
the love of their chosen field, that makes learning desirable, and
that ensures they will do the best for their clients or
patients.

“It saddens me that in the 90 years from when Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis showed a dystopian view of society that we may be doing
our utmost to reproduce it in the present.

“Measuring work by its outcomes only denies the value of the
human input and creativity. If not careful, views like Susskind’s
will take us there.”

Culled from legalfutures.co.uk