The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services, John O. McGinnis & Russell G. Pearce, Fordham Law Review, Volume 82, No. 6. May 2015, pps 3041-3066.

“Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had a huge impact on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in the last eight years and very substantially decreasing the market value of newspapers. Because law consists of more specialized and personalized information, the disruption is beginning in law after journalism. But, its effects will be as wide ranging. Indeed they may ultimately be greater, because legal information is generally of higher value, being central to the protection of individuals’ lives and property. The disruption has already begun. In discovery, for instance, computationally based services are already replacing the task of document review that lawyers have performed in the past. But computational services are on the cusp of substituting for other legal tasks—from the generation of legal documents to predicting outcomes in litigation. And when machine intelligence becomes as good as lawyers in developing some service or some factor of production that contributes to a service, it does not stop improving. Intelligent machines will become better and better, both in terms of performance and cost. And unlike humans, they can work ceaselessly around the clock, without sleep or caffeine. Such continuous technological acceleration in computational power is the difference between previous technological improvements in legal services and those driven by machine intelligence. This difference makes it the single most important phenomenon with which the legal profession will need to grapple in the coming decades. These developments have enormous implications for every aspect of law—legal practice, jurisprudence, and legal education. Here, we focus on one important consequence : the weakening of lawyers’ market power over providing legal services. We argue that these developments will generally increase competition. They will commoditize legal services, permitting clients to make easier price comparisons. They will also bring in new entrants, both as direct suppliers of services and low-cost providers of inputs to services of lawyers.”