My belief is that we won't have (real) self-driving cars until long after we've automated lawyers -- legal work being a much more constrained, simpler problem without too much potential to kill people.
I bet the bank is offloading to "the system" the niche find-and-seek jobs that interns did before.
Something like "find me all the contracts for mortgages in seattle between 1996 and 2004 on fixed rate loan and with guarantees in the same state, and delaware, and _____".
Then bundling all to a senior lawyer and then offloading to the CRM.
Absolutely. If your job is data in -> data out, your job will be taken by a computer. Most of the work lawyers do is just this. Human lawyers will be relegated to client relations and high level strategy. Most documents will be first drafted by a computer, then edited by a human. So law firm partners will still have work, but the need for associates will dry up as computers take over
Definitely not for full automation. The question "do I have a case?" could involve basically anything, and sounds very AI-complete to me.
Of course, discovery and a lot of the repetitive work can be automated much more easily, but that's more like keeping the car in a highway lane, which we can already do for cars.
Attorney here. Frequently do case evaluations for my firm. I prototyped this last year. It was not as hard as you would think if you have some experience in the area of law.
My belief is that we won't have (real) self-driving cars until long after we've automated lawyers -- legal work being a much more constrained, simpler problem without too much potential to kill people.