Witnessing the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the past decades has been exciting, and will continue to be so in the years to come. But seeing computers evolve also brings a bit of fear even to some of the brightest minds across the industries.
All their fears are ultimately voiced into a single question: Will I eventually be replaced by AI?
The answer is simple.
No. And the reasons are plenty.
In 2020 the World Economic Forum stated that by 2025 AI will replace about 85 million jobs. What people often forget to mention, though, is that 97 million new jobs will be created owing to AI.
What does this mean for lawyers?
First of all, your job description will most likely change, albeit slightly. Thanks to the adoption of AI in legal operations, a lot of your routine work will be taken care of by legal document automation software.
You will finally have time to focus on tasks you actually enjoy.
In this blog post, we will look at 3 rock-solid reasons why legal document automation software, such as AXDRAFT, will not replace lawyers, but help them perform even better than before.
Legal document automation can’t build relationships
Contracts govern relationships, and relationships are crafted by people. According to Gartner, 85% of clients will miss human interaction if AI takes over.
Without emotional intelligence, AI cannot build trust, show empathy, or crack a joke during negotiations to ease the tension in a room.
On the other hand, when a lawyer is armed with document workflow automation, any negotiations take 50% less time.
This means that you and your client can avoid long discussions and tiresome travels to each other’s offices, and get straight to business.
Legal document automation cannot build trust, show empathy, or crack a joke at negotiations to ease the tension in a room
Being liberated from hours of routine contract management, you can focus on building relationships and trust, develop a compliant growth strategy, and present it to a client.
With more meaningful work at hand, you won’t ever feel like you’re not doing enough. Dealing with impostor syndrome will remain off the list of your worries.
All in all, AXDRAFT law document automation software will indeed take away a big chunk of your daily tasks, such as template drafting, proofreading, and other monotonous work that you would eagerly delegate to someone else.
Giving you more time to focus on one important question – how to become a successful lawyer.
Legal document automation cannot make decisions
Documents follow certain patterns. There is a structure that clauses adhere to, and if you take two legal templates of the same contract, such as NDA, you will only notice minor differences in the structure and content of the document.
This is why it is so easy for a computer to analyze contracts and create new ones. Legal document automation is programmed to do one thing’?analyze patterns and find the ones that correspond to given parameters.
Tell your contract lifecycle management software to create a template with clauses that aren’t present in your legal playbook. The AI will ask you ‘?which of the previous templates should I use?’.
As of today, Artificial Intelligence cannot think creatively, come up with new things, and make decisions. Lawyers are valuable because they think outside the box.
Being gifted with imagination, lawyers can think of all the possible outcomes of the case. They can determine, based on their experience, which outcomes are most likely to happen, and which are least. Then it’s a matter of choice and action to make sure that the scenario develops your way.
Machines do not have the processing power of a human brain to perform such tasks.
However, if you think that AI is not needed in the decision-making process, you will be wrong in doing so.
AXDRAFT legal document automation is able to quickly analyze huge volumes of data and present it to a lawyer in the form of charts, graphs, and reports.
For example, the clauses of the contract that you received from a third party, or the average time the negotiations last. Or the amount of contracts you are able to sign in a month.
This enhances your ability to evaluate the current situation, make decisions faster, and spend less time and effort on gathering your legal department metrics.
Eventually, lawyers that use legal tech become more productive and efficient than lawyers who don’t.
Legal document automation has to be operated by a lawyer
Despite being able to solve the hardest puzzles, take care of routine work in nanoseconds, and process data 24/7, AI software cannot propose new projects or nag at clients to finally review and sign a contract.
Any software, no matter how smart, requires an operator to work. Even rockets have to be operated by astronauts.
As we mentioned before, computers don’t make decisions. Even the most basic tasks’?drafting, automation, invitation to collaborate, and signing’?require a lawyer to launch the process.
Any software, no matter how smart, requires an operator to work.
It is up to the lawyer to feed the system new templates and create new clauses for the playbook. Lawyers assign user roles, and choose when to invite people to review the contract, approve it or put an electronic signature on it.
Without human interference, software will remain to be thousands of lines of code, waiting for someone to press the buttons.
Conclusion
Despite all the hype, Artificial Intelligence is far from being fully independent. Most likely, it never will be. Even the most sophisticated chat bots and robots follow conversational patterns they learned from.
They simply had enough time and data to be able to study well.
Same goes for AXDRAFT legal document automation software. With every contract you give it to analyze, it becomes smarter, has more contract data to learn from, and delivers better, more compliant legal templates for you to work with.
But it still needs you as a teacher.
By implementing legal tech into your legal department’s operations, you will be able to unravel the true value of your legal department, and enhance your workload prioritization, communication, and decision-making processes.
If you want to make your lawyer stop complaining about technology, show them to AXDRAFT and our instant demo. They will get a pitch-perfect, ready-to-use NDA in less than a minute, and will change their view on technology.
Remember: Artificial Intelligence won’t replace lawyers. But lawyers that use AI will eventually replace those who don’t.