Law Students in the Digital Marketplace

How the employment structure of law students will change in the age of algorithmisation?

Szymon Skalski Former Treasurer for ELSA Cracow

The post-pandemic world is a highly uncertain reality, especially in a matter so sensitive to change as the labour market. While the legal industry is often considered to be rather conservative when it comes to changing well-known solutions, it seems impossible that the long-term forced digitalisation of work will not leave a significant mark on the work of lawyers. This forces us to take seriously the discussion on the future fate of certain pillars of the whole industry. From the perspective of the employment of law students, one of the key aspects seems to be the substitutability of their work by more or less sophisticated algorithms or computer programs (AI or non-AI). However, to address these concerns as a whole, it is necessary to pre-determine the nature of the work that students most often perform in law firms. It seems that there are 3 aspects that best show the nature of work in a law firm before becoming an advocate or legal adviser: administrative work, research, and drafting simple procedural documents. Administrative work, which usually involves helping to organise work in a law firm and put in order documents, seems to be one of the first tasks that may be completely delegated for execution by algorithms. Basing the firm's work on a simple algorithm for coordinating the work of employed lawyers, organising documentation, and keeping calendars seem today not so much a future as a very real possibility. What is more, such solutions do not have to be implemented using algorithms; probably sufficiently advanced software not based on machine learning could be sufficient to replace the work of students, secretaries, or office managers in this aspect though it might still require some level of censorship over it while AI would conduct those operations fully on its own and present workers with final results daily. Taking into account actions such as the e-Justice strategy1 introduced in the European Union and the awareness of certain backwardness of the judiciary in relation to today's world, it seems only a matter of time before the fully automated circulation of documents between parties, courts, and attorneys is introduced. The work of organising documents will then become completely redundant, or at least simplified to such an extent that it eliminates the need to employ additional staff. Perhaps the most essential part of the work of young lawyers in law firms is the substantive task of finding the information necessary to draft pleadings and

conduct cases. Unfortunately, this work at a certain level of complexity is also quite easily substitutable. Simple expert systems used for data analysis began to emerge as early as 1965, and since then, with few interruptions, the capabilities of the algorithms have only grown. Of course, complex work, especially that which involves ethical issues such as criminal law, still needs to be not only supervised but also, in most situations, managed by a human. It seems, however, that the legal market will soon have to resolve the dilemma of whether to stick to a conservative stance or move with the times and delegate many hours of reading of legal acts and regulations to algorithms. As of today, algorithms are capable of acquiring and processing vast amounts of data at a rate unattainable by an ensemble of humans. Of course, elements such as algorithmic bias and EU regulations limit the possibility of using and developing the most invasive algorithms, but this does not change the fact that at the simplest level of research, which is just collecting information without processing it in detail, AI capabilities far exceed human ones. For many law firms, this may be a sufficient reason to stop offering internships and training to students. The final aspect of the work identified is the drafting of simple procedural documents. While this is a long shot, it seems that simple documents especially those based on accounting documents such as invoices could easily be drafted on a mass scale without any human input. It should be noted, however, that, especially when dealing with a huge number of very similar commercial cases, computer programs that compose the content of the claim themselves are already widely used today. While some human supervision is still necessary, systems that completely bypass lawyers, especially in very simple and repetitive cases, do not seem to be far in the future. Of course, there are again legal and customary barriers, but the market and lobbying groups have a great influence on created laws, which may result in faster adaptation of the law to technological realities. When diagnosing the current situation, therefore, one must bear in mind the sensitivity of the matter in question. Many people have a negative attitude towards changes introducing algorithms into widespread use, especially in industries dealing with such important aspects of life in the 21st-century society as the legal industry. However, assuming an economic paradigm of profitability while maintaining focus on maximizing the results of lawyers' work, progressive algorithmisation seems inevitable. The industry will therefore be faced with the dilemma of how to engage law students in such an important aspect of their education as learning about the market environment in which they will work, in a situation where the work they can do is becoming less and less necessary. The answer is to be found at university. In the situation depicted in this article, it seems necessary for universities to take on the role of law firms in offering work experience opportunities to students. Initiatives to support this approach include moot courts and all sorts of local and international student exchange programmes to improve legal skills. We cannot leave students in a situation where, on the one hand, the market does not need their work while they are still at university and, on the other hand, when they finish their studies they are required to enter the highest level of legal work instantly, as simpler tasks are delegated to algorithms and computer programmes. It is for this reason that legal education in Europe and worldwide should adapt rapidly to the realities of a changing world. This presupposes actions such as: including the law of new technologies as a compulsory subject, making it possible to learn programming languages, increasing digital awareness of future lawyers. Without these and many other skills, future law students will be vulnerable to all the radical changes in the labour market caused by technology. Whether we like it or not, the legal profession is facing far-reaching changes and we need to prepare for them already at the stage of our university studies.