Technology is often for destroying traditional working-class jobs in sectors like manufacturing and retail.
But blue collar jobs aren't the only ones at risk.
The legal profession — tradition-bound and labor-heavy — is on the cusp of a transformation in which artificial-intelligence platforms dramatically affect how legal work gets done.
Those platforms will mine documents for evidence that will be useful in litigation, to review and create contracts, raise red flags within companies to identify potential fraud and other misconduct or do legal research and perform due diligence before corporate acquisitions.
Those are all tasks that — for the moment at least — are largely the responsibility of flesh-and-blood attorneys.
Increasing automation of the legal industry promises to increase efficiency and save clients money, but could also cut jobs in the sector as the Technology becomes responsible for tasks currently performed by humans.
Advocates of AI, however, argue there could actually be an increase in the sector's labor force as the technology drives costs down and makes legal services more affordable to greater numbers of people.
"It's like the beginning of the beginning of the beginning," said Noory Bechor, CEO of LawGeex, a leading AI-powered platform for legal contract review.
"Legal, right now, I think is in the place that other industries were 10 and 15 years ago, like travel," he said.
Replacing drudge work
Bechor's transition from lawyer to AI advocate came as a result of his own experience working at a large law firm in Israel.
"I did a lot of contract work for small companies, as well as for investors and multinational companies," he said.
The work was drudge-like and often almost mechanical.
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"For me, it was mind-blowing that I needed to reinvent the wheel each time I needed to create a contract or each time I needed to review a contract."
And, "I was feeling this pain, day in and day out, working these crazy hours," he said.
But Bechor also began realizing that as he reviewed more and more contracts, he became better at doing the tedious work.
"You get the hang of it," he said. "You have it in your head what a contract should and should not contain."
"That's what convinced me that a significant part of this could be automated," Bechor said.
The LawGeex platform, he said, "can take a new contract, one that it's never seen before, read it and then compare it to a database of every similar contract that it's seen in the past."
Like other AI platforms, LawGeex also learns from each review it performs — just like Bechor and other humans in the profession learned to do as young lawyers.
What machines do better than people
One question raised by the introduction of AI legal platforms is how well they do their jobs compared to a flesh-and-blood lawyer, who has years of experience under her belt.
Will the machine miss things that a good lawyer with a lot of experience would otherwise catch? Proponents don't think so.
"That's an argument that been refuted quite a bit," said Jay Leib, founder and managing member of NexLP. Leib's Chicago-based company offers eDiscovery, an AI platform that searches documents for information relevant to lawsuits and other litigation.
"Can you miss anything? Sure," Leib said of AI legal tools.
"But since 1985, we've known that human beings are not very good at keyword searches," he said. "There's this fallacy that human beings looking at documents is the gold standard. Not true. They're missing things."
He also said the explosion in the amount of electronic data generated today makes it hard for human workers to keep up.
"There's just so much more data now that you need these technologies to boil the ocean for you" and find relevant material, Leib said.
Leib said NexLP is "not just looking at the text" of a document or email.
