> It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.
In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into "databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best to read data from a flat file).
At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract review attorneys. Entire rooms would be filled to the brim with these guys, paid anywhere between $20-$40 an hour to tab through page after page of document metadata and images.
The entire industry was on the verge of being completely upended, and this is in fact starting to have effect. The article on topic modelling and LDA that's also on the front page today is particularly germane, as there are in fact implementations of topic modelling and LDA for the legal technology world.
This is my experience as well. If you look at just the "e-Discovery" product space, corporations are saving literally millions of dollars by implementing digital tools instead of retaining outside council to trawl through files looking for discoverable data. This alone is costing a lot of lawyers and paralegals their jobs.
In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into "databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best to read data from a flat file).
At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract review attorneys. Entire rooms would be filled to the brim with these guys, paid anywhere between $20-$40 an hour to tab through page after page of document metadata and images.
The entire industry was on the verge of being completely upended, and this is in fact starting to have effect. The article on topic modelling and LDA that's also on the front page today is particularly germane, as there are in fact implementations of topic modelling and LDA for the legal technology world.