Robot roll call …

If I had any faith that the Venn diagram showing overlap between readers of this blog and fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 had broad, heavy shading in the overlapping areas of the circles, then I would take this joke all the way with some clever effort at following up the title with a first line “In the not-too-distant future, next Sunday A.D.,” but I don’t, so I’m not.

In fact, at this point by having dropped off the map for a bit to pursue what was, and what I should have been realized sooner was, a fool’s errand, I can’t definitively believe that I still have any readers at all.  Hoping to do better moving forward with the regular posting.

The purpose of today’s post, in addition to apologizing into what might be a void, is to very quickly reference just how quickly things are moving in a certain aspect of the legal tech space – something that is not quite AI but seems like it, the world of chatbots.

Last week there were two pretty significant stories in the legal press regarding developments in this area.  First, the maker of DoNotPay (the most well-known/most influential legal chatbot to date) announced that not only has it made legal chatbots available at present for some 1,000 areas of law but that it has made its framework available for lawyers to use to create their own chatbots for areas of law not presently provided for.  You can read more of the details at the ABA Journal online. 

The thing that I find most interesting about this sort of development is not just the role that such chatbots can play for would-be-consumers of legal services to solve their own issues without lawyers, but the potential for lawyers to use the chatbots themselves to venture into areas in which they do not otherwise have expertise to represent clients and claim the work product generated by the bot as their own.

A second story made the rounds about another software/robot offering that is more AI than chatbot that would serve as competition for paralegals in the patent marketplace and likely – quite quickly – beyond.  Again, you can read more about RoboReview a patent drafting software product at the Journal.

Beyond the obvious upside for lawyers of access to this kind of AI and machine learning to do their own job, and the work of others that might assist them, faster and perhaps better, the existence of these kinds of products could serve to prevent lawyers from being in position to make the bad choice this Texas attorney is being alleged to have made to try to keep his legal assistant in the United States.