Atty. Gregorio B. Austral, CPA
In the advent of new technology:
Are lawyers becoming obsolete?
Not yet. But in the near future, lawyers may no longer be needed in solving some legal problems. Lawyers may only be needed when the law requires the presence of lawyers who are human.
There is now an emerging trend of consulting AI (Artificial Intelligence) robots instead of lawyers. So we ask the question: “Are lawyers becoming obsolete?” Meet ROSS, the artificially intelligent attorney. In the US, ROSS has joined the ranks of a big law firm which employs about 50 human lawyers in dealing with bankruptcy cases. According to the Washington Post, ROSS serves as a legal researcher which can sift through thousands of legal documents and select relevant passages of law and then allows lawyers to interact with them. Lawyers can either enforce ROSS’s hypothesis or get it to question its hypothesis.
We have been past the age when you need to scan physically the pages of law books and other printed legal materials and write our legal arguments using our dependable typewriters. The first wave of technological disruption was when typewriters in different law offices and court houses were replaced by computers and printers. The practice of law has also been drastically changed when lawyers abandoned the use of cloth-bound case reports and instead used CDs and DVDs containing the compilation of all cases decided by the Supreme Court and other lower courts.
Now, it is time to consider replacing legal researchers and associate lawyers in law firms since ROSS is in our midst. Soon, ROSS and other AIs will be replaced human lawyers when it comes to legal consultation. Unless there is a law prohibiting the use of AIs to provide legal advice, AIs will soon become our trusted legal advisers.
Notaries public should not be sitting comfortably in their offices today. Although they enjoy the monopoly of magically transforming a private document into a public one clothed with the presumption of genuineness and due execution, this monopoly will soon be gone. The reality is that the genuineness and due execution attributed to notarized documents is just a mere legal fiction. When the document is the subject of a litigation, it is presumed genuine and duly executed by the parties. Because this is a mere presumption, our courts allow a contending party to contest its genuineness and due execution by presenting a clear, positive and convincing evidence that it is otherwise.
Is there a new technology that can possibly replace the notary public? It appears that notarized documents will be a thing of the past, soon. With the use of smart contracts, witnesses and notaries public may no longer be needed to ensure the genuineness and valid execution of contracts.
A smart contract is not a simple contract written using a word processor. Blockgeeks.com describes a smart contract as a computer code that can facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares, or anything of value. When running on the blockchain a smart contract becomes like a self-operating computer program that automatically executes when specific conditions are met. Because smart contracts run on the blockchain, they run exactly as programmed without any possibility of censorship, downtime, fraud or third party interference.
Like the DNA technology, the blockchain technology may not be familiar to us yet. In the future, it will gain a wide acceptance not just in the community of technology experts but in the general population. Our Philippine Supreme Court initially rejected DNA evidence because it was a relatively new technology then. But in 2007, the Court acknowledged the reliability of the technology and issued the Rule on DNA Evidence.
It is expected that AI and blockchain technology will find its way in every facet of our lives. By then, many industries will be displaced, market leaders challenged, and the way we do things permanently changed. These are disruptive innovations that lawyers cannot plead for exemption. Lawyers are faced with only two options: adapt to these innovations or suffer from obsolescence.