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Law firm hires first robot lawyer

First Artificial Intelligent Lawyer Hired By Firm
First Artificial Intelligent Lawyer Hired By Firm


Baker & Hosteller has become the first ever law firm to hire an artificially intelligent lawyer. 'Ross' works in the bankruptcy practice, and has raised the possibility of paralegals and lawyers losing their jobs to robots.

The computerised lawyer from IBM is designed to read and understand language - so it can pick up the entire body of law. You can then ask it questions, and it will postulate a hypothesis - and provide all the research and citations required to back it up.

It will save lawyers and paralegals hours of trawling through dusty records to dredge up useful case law, and the law firm using it hopes it will speed things up, and improve research, so clients will get a better service. The company behind 'Ross' expects there to be an artificially intelligent lawyer in every practice.

There are clearly benefits in using Ross - who doesn't need to take holidays (or sleep); and has a super-human capacity to store knowledge and bring up the relevant pieces of information at key moments.

Jobs

However, it has the potential to put thousands of paralegals, clerks and junior lawyers out of a job. It reflects findings from the University of Oxford and Deloitte, which estimated that 35% of current jobs are at risk from robots and computers over the next 20 years.

NPR claims that telemarketers face the biggest risk of having their job taken by a robot (99% chance), while cashiers, bank clerks, bookkeepers and drivers have more than a 97% chance of losing their jobs to automation. Manufacturing, production and packaging have already seen a huge swathe of jobs lost to automation, and the study expects the vast majority of the rest to go too.

If you want to specialise in the kind of role that will never be automated, the study suggests you train as a mental health and substance abuse social worker - because they have a 0.3% chance of losing their job to a robot.

But what do you think? Is your job safe from automation, or could a robot easily handle your job? Let us know in the comments.