Legal AI: As Transformative as the Printing Press?

This Debevoise blog analogizes the potential effect of integration of AI tools into high-end legal services to the invention of the printing press.  Prior to that time, producing books was a slow, laborious process. Once Gutenberg’s new tool came onto the scene, however, books could be produced much more quickly and cheaply, but each was still “impressive, customized, and unique.”  Here’s the lesson the blog says should be drawn from that experience when thinking about the impact of legal AI:

Similar to the printing press, legal AI creates the opportunity for lawyers to automate certain aspects of their work (e.g., conducting research, generating first drafts of contracts, initial review of diligence or litigation documents), freeing them up to allocate their judgment and experience to more clients (and the hardest questions for those clients), thereby creating additional supply to meet growing demand.

One of the underappreciated innovations of the printing press was that it struck a new balance between standardization and customization. Legal AI can do the same. By absorbing the parts of legal work that can be automated, legal AI enables lawyers to spend more of their time where they add the most value and deliver high-end legal services to more clients, more quickly, without compromising the quality of the most crucial components of legal advice.

The blog concludes by asserting that the lesson to be derived from the printing press is that improved automation doesn’t eliminate the need for expertise, but directs it to where it is most valuable.