Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had a huge impact on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in the last eight years1 and very substantially decreasing the market value of newspapers. Because law consists of more specialized and personalized information, the disruption is beginning in law after journalism. But, its effects will be as wide ranging. Indeed they may ultimately be greater, because legal information is generally of higher value, being central to the protection of individuals’ lives and property.

The disruption has already begun. In discovery, for instance, computationally based services are already replacing the task of document review that lawyers have performed in the past. But computational services are on the cusp of substituting for other legal tasks—from the generation of legal documents to predicting outcomes in litigation. And when machine intelligence becomes as good as lawyers in developing some service or some factor of production that contributes to a service, it does not stop improving. Intelligent machines will become better and better, both in terms of performance and cost. And unlike humans, they can work ceaselessly around the clock, without sleep or caffeine. Such continuous technological acceleration in computational power is the difference between previous technological improvements in legal services and those driven by machine intelligence. This difference makes it the single most important phenomenon with which the legal profession will need to grapple in the
coming decades.

These developments have enormous implications for every aspect of law—legal practice, jurisprudence, and legal education. Here, we focus on one important consequence: the weakening of lawyers’ market power over providing legal services. We argue that these developments will generally increase competition. They will commoditize legal services, permitting clients to make easier price comparisons. They will also bring in new entrants, both as direct suppliers of services and low-cost providers of inputs to services of lawyers.

These new technologies will substantially shake up the legal profession, harming the economic prospects of many lawyers, but providing advantages to some others. Machines may actually aid two kinds of lawyers in particular. First, superstars in the profession will be more identifiable and will use technology to extend their reach. Second, lawyers who can change their practice or organization to take advantage of lower cost inputs made available by machines will be able to serve an expanding market of legal services for middle-class individuals and small businesses, meeting previously unfulfilled legal needs.

Machines may, at least at first, neither greatly help nor substantially harm other classes of lawyers and some of their functions. First, because machines will not speak in court for the foreseeable future, oral advocates will continue to enjoy a lucrative niche, although machines may reduce the number of disputes by creating a convergence of litigants on the value of a case. Second, those lawyers who are in highly specialized areas subject to rapid legal change, like Dodd-Frank regulation, will be relatively unaffected, because machines will work best in more routinized and settled areas. Third, counselors who must persuade unwilling clients to do what is in their self-interest will also continue to have a role, since machines will be unable to create the necessary emotional bonds with clients.

But journeymen lawyers—such as those who write routine wills, vet house closings, write standard contracts, and review documents—face a much bleaker future, because machines will do many such routine legal tasks. Thus, while the arrival of the machines will be generally good for consumers, the picture is much more mixed for lawyers.

The surest way for lawyers to retain the market power of old is to use bar regulation to delay and obstruct the use of machine intelligence. But bar regulation will generally be unavailing. First, lawyers will be able to use many machine-created products to make their own work more cost effective. Thus, using machine inputs can comply with bar regulation, while also creating competitive pressures by lowering costs and reducing the need for the aid of other lawyers. Second, even if unauthorized practice laws in the United States do not change to permit extensive machine intelligence in the production of legal services, those laws will continue to prove ineffective in stemming the emergence of widespread machine lawyering and preserving lawyers’ monopoly. Moreover, the global nature of machine intelligence will continue to put pressure on the U.S. market for legal services, regardless of the laws of the United States. The message here is that the machines are coming, and bar regulation will not keep them out of the profession or do much to delay their arrival.

This Article proceeds in two Parts. Part I describes the relentless growth of computer power in hardware, software, and data collection capacity. This Part emphasizes that machine intelligence is not a one-time event that lawyers will have to accommodate. Instead, it is an accelerating force that will invade an ever-larger territory and exercise a more firm dominion over this larger area. We then describe five areas in which machine intelligence will provide services or factors of production currently provided by lawyers: discovery, legal search, document generation, brief generation, and prediction of case outcomes. Part II discusses how these developments may create unprecedented competitive pressures in many areas of lawyering. This Part further shows that bar regulation will be unable to stop such competition. Because bar regulation will be ineffective, we expect an age of unparalleled innovation in legal services, as startups compete to deliver important components of legal tasks in new ways.

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