Stark warning from Susskind

Renowned legal author and lecturer, Professor Richard Susskind, today gave a warning about the future of the profession when speaking at the Law Society’s annual conference.

He stated that over the course of the next decade, artificial intelligence would move forward so quickly that systems themselves would be able to assess, diagnose and respond to the legal problems posed by clients.

But instead of suggesting that this was a threat to the profession, Susskind instead stated that it was an opportunity to become engineers of knowledge, and to shape the future of the profession in a positive way.

“For the next five years the legal profession will work on using better human-resource models, delegate to paralegals, move to better locations and give lawyers far better systems,” he stated.

“It is not that there are no jobs in the future, but the 2020s will be a decade of redeployment not unemployment. It is not an emergency but over the next five years we have to prepare. More and more legal services will be enabled by the support of new technology. You can say "that is for the technology industry to sort out”, or you can be part of the technology industry.”?

He went on to criticise law schools for “churning out 20th Century lawyers”, claiming that he had tried and failed to prove to them that they needed to adapt their training and education of lawyers to respond to artificial intelligence.

Susskind concluded with a warning, claiming that: “We as a profession have about five years to reinvent ourselves to move from being world-class legal advisers to world-class legal technologists.”

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