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Innovation through technology has become more sophisticated and intelligent in recent years, intensifying the threat to lawyer jobs. Yet, it has been suggested that clients are now more fearful of robots handling their work than lawyers are of losing their jobs to machines.
Speaking at this week’s Artificial Intelligence in Legal Services Summit, Dr Ruth Angus, chief operating officer of machine learning platform Luminance, said things have “started to change” in the last year, adding:
“Instead of lawyers being frightened of the technology, clients are thinking: ‘I am handing over a lot of work. Are they giving it to a robot?’.”
We have seen all manner of ‘rise of the robots’ headlines in recent years and Angus, who holds a PhD in neuroscience, said there had been “a lot of scaremongering” about robot lawyers. She said “instead of becoming robots”, lawyers can use artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen their position but noted that “there are still a lot of people who are very scared”.
This follows research that 86% of British people would prefer to receive legal advice from humans over robots.