There was a recent article in the NY Times which talked about how “e-discovery” software was poised to put some attorneys out of work and how the advent of artificial intelligence was making a great impact on the legal profession as a whole.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document revieware no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Because computers can now mimic human intelligence, as evidenced by artificial intelligence “Watson” on Jeopardy, some are predicting that the impact on the legal profession could be more significant than imagined. Already, as noted by some legal recruiters, it’s difficult for attorneys to get document review work as they did in the past because software has taken over that task at a much cheaper rate. But what about more complex tasks such as analyzing legal documents and drawing conclusions. It seems that there are computers who can, to an extent even draw conclusions based on data it receives.

While most basic software such as a search engine uses keywords to sort relevant documents,there is software being developed which can not only sort documents based onkeywords; but that can analyze the data, using deductive reasoning to draw conclusions.  For example, the software can analyze a sequence of events and then identify “digital anomalies”and could for instance point out suspicious activity in a white-collar criminal investigation.

What does all ofthis mean for attorneys? Well it doesn’t mean that machines will replace attorneys but it could mean that attorneys and machines may have an entirely new relationship. We could see a future where attorneys depend heavily upon the reasoning and logic skills of machines.