People and businesses empowered by artificial intelligence will ‘probably be the biggest competitors of law firms in the future’, believes professor Richard Susskind.
The renowned legal futurologist told delegates at the IBA Legal Practice Division showcase that firms ‘need a contingency plan’ for the arrival of artificial general intelligence between 2030 and 2035.
‘By the early 2030s we’ll have GenAI Plus - by which I meaning in this context the kinds of systems that today you rightly use with caution and feel need to be supervised by humans,’ he said. ‘We won’t feel that anymore and nor will insurers. It’ll turn out that these systems working in isolation will be more reliable than working with humans.
‘AGI means these systems can do anything that we as humans can do with our remarkable brains and minds. We don’t yet have the vocabulary for this, but they’re as smart, they’re as capable, they’re as intelligent as us. They can do anything that we do in our daily work. That was what AGI will be about: these systems matching human performance.’
The profession’s current focus is on deploying AI for productivity gains, but firms must take a more strategic approach, Susskind stressed.
‘The market will show no loyalty to our old ways of working if the results or the outcomes that are needed can be delivered in ways that are more convenient, quicker, less costly and of higher quality. That message [is] for everyone in this room and for everyone in professional services… There’s not a law firm in the world that’s prepared for AGI.’
Susskind described as ‘fallacious’ the comforting argument made by lawyers that there can never be a substitute for human judgement. Describing this as the ‘judgement misjudgement’, he pointed that machines can already handle uncertainty in many cases better than humans.
‘This is about empowering non-professionals to do stuff for themselves that used to require human expertise. So the AI-empowered people and AI-empowered businesses are actually probably the biggest competitors of law firms in the future. We’ll move to a world where we’re no longer charging for time because it won’t be a time-based service. We’ll be licensing content and systems. The short-term story of AI is AI for use by lawyers. The long-term story is AI for use by non-lawyers. In a very simple schematic.’
Younger lawyers will design the systems that will replace current ways of working, said Susskind, which has profound implications for training.
He concluded: ‘When I’m asked to answer the question, “What is the future of lawyers?”, I say that’s the wrong question. The question is, how in the future will organisations and businesses solve the problems to which lawyers are their current best answer? And my answer to that question, at least in part and in large part, is going to be artificial intelligence.’
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