More Bad News for Law Grads

Soon after I began working for a large Los Angeles law firm in 1989, I was assigned to work on discovery in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, which occupied me and dozens of other attorneys for a couple of years.  According to an article in the New York Times today, technology may soon replace attorneys in the arena of document review.   Although many attorneys felt they were making poor use of their law degrees when working for months on end on document production, discovery in large cases was certainly good for job seekers.  E-discovery software may well be another trend about which law schools need to worry.

Comments

[TJ]

While I can agree with the bottom line, I think this analysis is a little too simplistic. Economists never cease to point out that technological progress is not a bad thing for the economy or for workers, on net. For example, better computers and word processing software are a good thing, on net, and for most workers--they are a terrible thing if you happen to be a secretary.

For lawyers, on net, electronic discovery software will probably be a very good thing. It is not like this software reduces the amount of litigation or their stakes, and so the amount of legal spending (which ultimately depends on the stakes involved) probably will not decrease. What lawyers will do is charge more per hour, and spend more of their time doing interesting things rather than mindless discovery work. And by ever-increasing rates for the most valuable partners, I think we see this trend already.

But there is one sub-category of lawyers that are analogous to the secretaries I just described: entry-levels and contract attorneys. And this development will probably be terrible for these lawyers; though the rest of the profession (especially the partners) will benefit.