“Machines will never take the place of lawyers …”

Attend any conference, trade show or CPD training session and it will only be a matter of time before someone trots out the phrase “AI will not replace lawyers, it will be lawyers using AI that will replace those that do not”. Usually accompanied by an irritating side-tilt of the head and a sympathetic look towards what they imagine is a terrified audience, as if to say; “use this uniquely valuable insight wisely, my simple friends”.

Only it isn’t valuable at all - it’s worthlessly patronising at best.

This hackneyed phrase has been trotted out for years, and most educated people are bored by its meaninglessly threatening overtones.  It’s like when a lawyer on the other side of deal writes an email threatening to take action involving the words, “court, summons and negligence” and thinks this will instil fear in the reader.  Ironically, it usually results in the missive being read out loud for the general amusement of colleagues.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that AI is going to change the working lives of lawyers, but no-one is quite sure in what way.  Yet.  While some remain convinced that machines cannot replace the technical work of human lawyers, the boundaries between the roles of machine and human are becoming increasingly blurred.

Man or pig - human or machine –who can tell?

The idea that machines cannot replace the experience of humans is not unreasonable.  Years spent in education and training, working on thousands of different transactions, results in valuable and unique expertise.  Like clients, every property has its own nuances and problems, which can be difficult to tease out, requiring human oversight and understanding to work out what is relevant and what is not.

Whilst we are getting comfortable with AI producing document summaries and checking the accuracy of forms, there is a lot of scepticism about concept of a machine replicating the legal interpretation process.

That’s why, taking inspiration from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it became impossible to tell the pigs from the humans, we decided to run a quiz to see whether lawyers could tell the difference between pre-contract enquiries that were created by machine or a human lawyer.

So go on – what happened?

We produced a set of five enquiries and asked lawyers to vote whether they thought they were produced by human or machine.   These were genuine enquiries that had been raised on real properties, and we wanted to see whether the tone and language used was convincing.

The results were intriguing.

Only 22% of lawyers guessed correctly which were machine made, with the biggest group ( 43% ) getting only three out of five correct.   Some didn’t get any of them right at all.

The key here is not whether the enquiries were relevant or not – that would not be possible to test without the source documentations, but whether this would effectively pass the famous Turing test.  Given that over three quarters of lawyers thought that they were reading the output of a human, we believe this does pass the test where humans could not tell whether a conversation was with a human or a machine.

What does this mean for lawyer?

It’s time for lawyers to acknowledge that they have lost the monopoly of knowledge that they used to enjoy.  In the past, consumers relied on their unique skill to raise the necessary questions to ensure that their enjoyment of the property would not be restricted, and it would be straightforward for them ( or their lender ) to sell the property in the future.

This rather devastating realisation needs to be tempered with the reality that clients still rely on our empathy and experience to provide the balance and reassurance that they are making an informed decision.  While we are seeing machines identifying issues and risks that even the most experienced lawyers will miss, this does not make their skills irrelevant.

Although document analysis expertise will become less valuable, the demand for calm, informed and reliable advice for clients will result in firms looking for confident communication skills from candidates, combined with a strong legal understanding.

Not Microsoft Co-Pilot prompt-writing skills.

Would YOU know the difference?

If you want to see whether you can recognise the difference between machine-raised enquiries and human-raised – our quiz is still available https://forms.gle/oT6UtDXTLuediKNM8. 

The results are shown here https://tinyurl.com/3m2tnjh5

Peter Ambrose is the CEO of The Partnership and Legalito – specialists in the delivery of transparent and ultra-efficient conveyancing software and services.

Peter Ambrose: pambrose@thepartnershiplimited.com, 01483 579978

Press enquiries: Tracy Holland, tholland@thepartnershiplimited.com 01483 579978