Highly qualified professions are not spared from AI. For one of them, robots could soon replace humans.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly asserting itself in different sectors. For some, it represents a threat since it could replace humans, particularly in the world of work. If at first glance, this seems to concern blue-collar professions, AI does not intend to stop there. Certain high-skilled professions could also be taken over by robots.
For example, the profession of lawyer could be particularly affected. Already in February 2023, the international law firm Allen & Overy gave its lawyers access to an AI chatbot to draft contracts, saving them two hours of time per week. With continued use, the system would even become capable of negotiating contracts, saving seven hours of time per week! However, can we compare the negotiation work of an artificial intelligence to that of a qualified lawyer?
To answer this question, Lauren Martin, from the AI center of excellence at legal technology company Onit, drew a parallel between the work of young lawyers and that of AI. His team asked professional lawyers to highlight important legal issues in a set of contracts. Then, she gave the same exercise to an artificial intelligence, trained for 16 hours previously.
According to Discover magazine, Claude or GPT-4 matched or even surpassed the accuracy of their human counterparts in identifying these legal issues. The biggest difference is seen in terms of speed: contract reviews were carried out in less than a minute by the AI compared to 56 minutes for the young lawyers! Financially, the observation is also clear. A young lawyer costs on average 74 dollars per contract review compared to 2 cents for the same task carried out by an AI.
“Large language models are poised to disrupt the legal industry, improving the accessibility and efficiency of legal services,” concluded Lauren Martin. For the latter, routine tasks could quickly be entrusted to AI systems. On the other hand, according to him, AI remains less efficient than professionals in more in-depth legal understanding. The work of the AI should also always be supervised since the test showed that sometimes, it raised problems in contracts which are in fact non-existent.
This idea is also approved by Douglas Hornung, lawyer and founder of the site Divorce.ch, who gave examples of tasks that AI can already accomplish for lawyers today: “Basic and classic contracts, good projects legal articles or conferences to prepare, legal opinions or usual procedural acts, the drafting of a contractual clause”, he listed for Focus.swiss. For him, this is only the beginning: “tomorrow, AI will better integrate the interaction between various contractual clauses, the structure and logic of an act, compliance with legislation or case law”.
He is also convinced that the machine will perform better and much faster than the lawyer. However, a professional will still be necessary at the start of a file to establish the strategy to adopt as well as the creative idea because AI remains a body of knowledge and therefore lacks inventiveness and appreciation. The lawyer will also always provide the empathy essential in this profession. According to the expert, the future of professional lawyers will be in specialization in specialized fields.