ABA Committee on Research About the
Future of the Legal Profession

Final Report: Alternate Scenario

2016: Diary of the Last Lawyer

I’m sitting in my law office and I think of the shortest ghost story in the world. The last man on earth was in his office. There was a knock on the door.

Actually, I’m not the last lawyer, but pretty close to it; I’m actually the last “senior” member of my law firm, now reduced to myself. I’m waiting for a knock on the door, which is the new tenant for the space. We have dissolved the law firm - we had to, there were no clients left. But let me tell you how this came about.

The first signs of the demise of the lawyer were probably seen earlier than 2002 but that was the year that corporate excesses were pushed in the face of the public: huge corporate profits to self-interested officials, destruction of the families and futures of shareholders and employees - in short, all nature of corporate excess was placed before the public. In the course of that, the public also became aware of the role of the lawyers in this looting and thus the mistrust of the legal profession accelerated. It was a long steep slope from there.

The public’s mistrust deepened and they began thinking of alternatives to high-priced, arrogant and insensitive lawyers. I was one of those and I did not realize what was happening and, like all the others, continued in my winning ways.

Sensing an opportunity, several enterprising technologists developed an artificial intelligence program. This AI program could achieve justice and be fair without the bias inherent in every human being, including judges. It could deliver results far more cheaply than humans. Other technology was developed simultaneously that could literally detect and determine the veracity of the inputted facts. The truth was knowable - by machines. Society accepted the verdict of the machines because truth could be determined, whether in criminal or civil matters. It required a change to the Constitution but that was accomplished due to overwhelming public support.

Oh, the lawyers fought it. We became strident and exorcised. We went to Congress and formed committees. We tried to pass laws outlawing the machines as the unlawful practice of law. The most rational of lawyers saw the inevitable triumph of machines but their opinions were discounted. How smart we seemed but we had outstayed our welcome. The Supreme Court, in one of its’ last acts, ruled that unauthorized practice did not apply to software, machines, or artificial intelligence.

Where was there to go with my skills in contentious advocacy? If only we had been sensitive to the clients’ concerns and less interested in the generation of fees and billable hours. Then we might not have lost the public’s trust. We could have used technology to reduce the cost of delivery of legal services. But we did not. We remained convinced that the machines would fail and our clients would return.

There may have been some defects in the machine’s resolution of issues early on. But, as it turned out, people were willing to accept that rather than go back to the old days of raucous, contentious lawyers in a slow, expensive system. Even bar associations abandoned lawyers when they realized programmers were their new membership.

Confident that the machines knew the truth and operated without bias, people agreed to be bound by the decisions of the machines. They found the machines to be quick, inexpensive, reliable and fair. In addition, there was no functional Federal trial judiciary: the stalemate in the U.S. Senate, which began in 2001, still exists and no nominees to the Federal bench had been confirmed since then. Several Federal judges had died from exhaustion. The law schools failed for want of applicants. Initially, they turned their resources to the training of programmers, creating a certification program for technicians. But soon, the programs were sufficiently able to improve themselves that the law schools no longer had a role to play. The people knew there was no turning back.

The practice of law had changed. Business and transactional information and services were readily available to anyone with Web access. Litigation and legal counsel were no longer the purview of the lawyer, as the machines were able to access research and compile the necessary information for processing cases. Fees were so reasonable that access was available across all strata of society.

I have to stop writing this now. I hear a knock at the door. It is the new tenant for my space. I am off to my new career, which is the maintenance of machinery for the resolution of disputes. I don’t know how long my new job will last because the machines continue to self-improve - one might say they are very intelligent.