A study by Deloitte has suggested that technology is already leading to job losses in the UK legal sector, and some 114,000 jobs could be automated within 20 years.

Professor Richard Susskind, a technology consultant and co-author of The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, predicts unprecedented upheaval in a profession where the working practices of some lawyers and judges have changed little since the time of Charles Dickens. “One question lurking in all this is whether someone can come in and do to law what Amazon did to bookselling,” he says. “We won’t see anything as dramatic, but we will see incremental transformations in areas like the way documents are reviewed and the way legal risk is assessed.”

Big law firms are pouring money into AI as a way of automating tasks traditionally undertaken by junior lawyers. Many believe AI will allow lawyers to focus on complex, higher-value work. An example is Pinsent Masons, whose TermFrame system emulates the decision-making process of a human. It was developed by Orlando Conetta, the firm’s head of R&D, who has degrees in law and computer science and did an LLM in legal reasoning and AI. TermFrame guides lawyers through different types of work while connecting them to relevant templates, documents and precedents at the right moments. He says AI will not make lawyers extinct but “is just another category of technology which helps to solve the problem”.

“Clients are aware of [AI] and how it will benefit them and they are asking the tough questions of us. In the past year we have gone from being in start-up mode to having the rest of the firm banging on our door asking about this,” says David Halliwell, a litigation lawyer and director of knowledge and innovation delivery at Pinsent Masons.