Will AI replace lawyers and judges or simply change the way they work and think about the law?
Back in the late 1980s, lawyers used to type their legal briefs on old-fashioned typewriters. Briefs were shorter then but drove right to the central issue of the case. Now some lawyers copy/paste long passages from other briefs and compose new ones running to hundreds of pages. Judges’ opinions are longer too, burying the true reasons behind their decisions in page after page of verbiage. Word-processing software makes it easy to spin out long briefs or opinions where the real issues often become blurred. More importantly, it seems the way we write has also affected the way we think.
