Legal Blog of Attorney Greg Curry

Informative article from Bloomberg about Wall Street's inevitable move towards automation. It's widely accepted that "low-skill" jobs will be the easiest to automate, such as many fast food jobs. But what about fancy Wall Street traders with their Harvard MBA's and all? It appears they aren't safe, either. This isn't exactly news. The majority of stock trading today is done by computer algorithms. And it has long seemed to me that, if any job were ripe to be replaced by robots, it would be stock traders, money managers, and similar jobs. Some quotes from the article: Yet in interviews, about a dozen Wall Street executives and consultants responsible for deploying technologies -- and steeped in their capabilities -- were more bearish on humans. Machines will take over task after task, they said, and banks simply won’t need nearly as many people. ... It’s time for senior managers to stop sugarcoating, said Simon Moss, who has been advising bank...

Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine. And maybe it's a pet peeve because I'm a lawyer and am looking forward to a long, fruitful career as a lawyer. But otherwise very smart people studying and developing Artificial Intelligence keep saying lawyers are one of the most obvious professions to be replaced by robots. Yet they continue to demonstrate that they don't understand what lawyers actually do. This is from a May, 2015 article  that appeared on pbs.org: Attorneys: Though it’s unlikely we’ll see robots litigating in courtrooms any time soon, Ford says that some highly billable work normally reserved for seasoned attorneys is in the process of being automated.“We are already seeing an impact in fields like law, with entry level and paralegal jobs which involve document review. It used to be a manual process. They had to read through documents. Now that’s done algorithmically using artificial intelligence.” “There’s a new emerging technology called quantitative lega...

The next major shift in labor in this country will be robots/Artificial Intelligence/automation replacing humans. It is happening already. After all, robots don't get sick. Robots don't take vacation or personal days. Robots don't need health insurance. You don't have to pay robots overtime. So what about lawyers? Could we be replaced? I was watching Charlie Rose interview an AI expert from Carnegie Mellon University. He said one of the first industries that will see a change to robots would be the legal industry. A couple other sources have said the same thing. My response: the idea that lawyers will be replaced by robots is idiotic. My first draft of this laid out numerous reasons why these people don't understand the many different kinds of lawyers there are and the many different kinds of things lawyers do. But the draft was too long. So I thought I'd focus on the main reason, which these people don't get. There is a fundamental reason why lawyer...

On Twitter, I often link to articles about how robots are replacing humans in various jobs. This isn't something I like talking about. It's terrible for those being replaced. But it is a fact, and that's why I do it. We are in the early stages of a radical change in how companies provide services and produce or sell goods. It is scary for workers, but the change has started, and it's not going to stop, and if you can be replaced by a robot, you will be. Those people protesting outside McDonald's headquarters in Chicago, wanting a $15/hour minimum wage and the right to unionize? They're organizing battles in a war they've already lost. McDonald's isn't going to give you $15/hour. McDonald's will just replace you with robots, and it's already working on it. (Frankly, the Chicago protesters strike me as more of a union-thing, more union power, more mandatory union dues, etc. But unions will decline as their members are replaced by robots....