[quote=flu]The reason why technology hasn’t pursued this isn’t that technology can’t eventually solve this problem. It’s all about cost.
It’s much cheaper to hire a young paralegal than to invest in technology to do the same thing. And given the way the legal profession has been over the past few years, there’s a lot of supply of people who can do all this work to such that at this point that there is no financial incentive to invest in technology to try this at a lower cost at this point.. Over the past few years many people pursue a career to be a lawyer. Some made it, many did not. And the ones that didn’t add to the ever increasing supply of folks playing supporting roles.
That said, you can’t replace a top trial lawyer and you probably can’t report a lawyer that is good negotiating. But eventually you could replace all the administrative functions with technology if cost was an issue.[/quote]flu, I don’t agree with either of your (italicized) statements (above) because it’s not that simple. A 22-23 year-old fresh out of paralegal school can’t possibly have the knowledge to do the same calibur work as a paralegal with decades of experience. A student in law school or paralegal school only learns generalities and theory of the law. They don’t learn the rules of court or how to format documents for a particular state or what forms are proper to use for a particular county wherein a different form might be used for another county in the same state to accomplish the same goal. In addition, they don’t know the nuances of the sitting trial judges in the county they are primarily working within. These judges’ individual “trial procedures” could be night and day from one another.
In SD, an experienced paralegal costs $30-$35K per year more to bring on board than does a beginning paralegal but is well worth the money in avoiding the aggravation of having to supervise the newbie green paralegal very closely and possibly being sanctioned by the court for missed deadlines, etc.
I’ve proofread a lot of work over the years done by newbies in the field as well as by workers for whom English was not their first language and found that the work from both of these groups was rife with errors. For example, without years of experience, one cannot successfully transcribe multiple people speaking who may have an English dialect the typist may have never heard (ie “Texan” or “Cajun”) or isn’t used to hearing. Nor can they understand what the parties are saying if they are talking over one another or one is crying. Also, I found that almost all the people doing the kind of work I do who were about 12 or more years younger than me apparently did not receive an adequate public education in the use of English, grammar or punctuation. Even if they were born in the US, the bulk of the public school systems in the US seem to have fallen down in this regard sometime around the mid-seventies. I’ve even proofread some of my kids’ college papers for them before submission and they all were full of errors. And my kids attended one of the “better” HS’s in SD county and even took “AP English” which did not exist at the time I went to HS. I received an excellent K-12 public education with a lot of rote sentence diagramming in English Grammar and learned “reading, writing and arithmetic” by rote memory with my teachers filling up whole rooms of blackboards and using their pointer to repeatedly summon students up to the blackboard to properly diagram a sentence for the class. For that, I am very grateful. It’s obvious to me that public schools haven’t taught the way I learned for several decades now …. to the detriment of the recent crops of HS graduates.
One who can’t read and write English succinctly and properly will be unsuccessful in the legal business, IMO. If they are an attorney who dictates bad grammar and erroneous punctuation (because that’s all they know) and they hire a secretary or paralegal to take their dictation for whom English is not their first language or a younger one with little practical experience on the job who flunked basic grammar in HS and did the minimum to get by in Freshman Comp in college (IF they attended college), the end result will likely be that their work turns out to be illegible gibberish that is unfileable and unserveable. That is, IF the attorney realizes this before it is actually filed and served, lol. If they don’t, their credibility could be at stake before the court. In addition, they will be embarrassed when the court’s research attorneys go thru every moving paper filed in their dept with a fined-toothed comb which is longer than ten pages and notate them for the judge (to save time on the court’s busy calendar).
Of course, attorneys are free to hire whomever will cost them the least or whose personality they “like” the best and live with the consequences. When I worked in law offices, I didn’t like others to touch my work because invariably, it got botched by someone else (usually very poorly formatted), later making me look bad when I shouldn’t have been blamed. Thus, I work better one on one with just 1-2 attorneys versus working within a hodgepodge pool of attorneys and other non-attorney personnel. I’ve never liked my “contributions” at work to get “lost in the shuffle” because when that happens, each worker is only as good as the lowest common denominator in their group.
I read the 1st page of the recent UT article you posted and feel the “plaintiff” who lost to Thomas Jefferson SOL probably should have won but for the allegations in her complaint in which she alleged insufficient detail. Thus, she could not bring those allegations forth in trial before her jury because she never alleged them in the first place. And she actually had a “human” for an attorney :=0
She can always work as a “paralegal” (as so many bar-cardholders do in SD) until such time as she lands a position as an attorney. She might be better off to take the bar exam in a “less-lawyered” state and seek employment there after she passes. CA has been a very hard market to break into (as a new lawyer) for 20+ years, now.
Back to the OP, I don’t believe the work of doctors, NPs and other medical personnel can be successfully outsourced to “robots,” either. I don’t know about you, but I would never want to leave my life in the hands of a “robot,” even if they were only prescribing medicine for me :=0
