The legal services industry in the United States generates about US$350 billion a year in fees. In the United Kingdom, the second largest market for legal services in the world, a 2020 report by KPMG for the Law Society estimated legal services generated value of around £60 billion a year after costs. So law is a substantial industry on both sides of the Atlantic, but its product is antiquated, expensive, opaque and of variable quality. Which is one reason why artificial intelligence (AI) is making inroads into the law already, chiefly by classifying, assembling, reading, comparing and managing documents, or at least helping less expensive employees to complete these tasks. However, there is a more fundamental reason that law is imperilled by the combination of digital technology and digitised data. This is that the product customers buy from lawyers – namely, specialist knowledge – is not physical. Since the analogue economy gave way to the digital, that knowledge has accumulated in digital form. Like any piece of digital information, the marginal cost of reproducing it is effectively zero. It can be consumed repeatedly, and by anyone, without any of its value being lost. In other words, the nature of legal knowledge means that digital technology condemns the law to a steady process of commoditisation. Resistance by lawyers, though it is bound to be ingenious, is futile. The legal profession must embrace its Nemesis, as many legal firms now are, by using AI to cut costs and enlarge their range of services, by being willing to trade exorbitant billable hours for fixed price sales volume and by seeking amalgamations with similarly threatened professions such as accountancy. This webinar will explore why the law has become an early use-case for AI, how legal firms are deploying AI in their practices today, what investment and technical challenges they must overcome, what benefits and problems they are encountering and what forms of resistance they are putting up.

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