Canadian Lawyer 4Students

54 AUGUST 2017 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4STUDENTS " Some legal experts predict a decline in job opportunities. Bryan Friedman, general manager for Canada at Axiom, which provides technology-enabled legal and contracting services, warns that "one area particularly impacted by technology is anything that involves high-volume, repetitive work." Technology promises to disrupt several areas of law, one being compliance. Examples include ComplyAdvantage, which uses ma- chine learning to identify compliance risk, while LawGeex uses similar artificial intelligence technology to make contract review more efficient. Further up the value chain, Ross Intelligence is selling AI based on IBM's Watson to read the entire body of law and generate re- sponses to natural language questions, along with citations. It is already working long hours at law firm Baker & Hostetler LLP's bankruptcy practice. Friedman says that technologies such as these are encroach- ing on junior tasks. Traditionally, first-year associates and beyond could expect to compile due diligence memorandums for corpo- rate transactions, he says. Moreover, they can do it more effectively and deliver more presentable results. Technology can not only automate the hours of review but also make the output more digestible, delivering a hierarchical, interac- tive reporting dashboard rather than a Word document. e human judgment of lawyers is still there, but it's being ap- plied at the upper levels of that analysis, says Friedman. Younger lawyers, robbed of their role, will be at a loose end. "Can you justify putting more expensive and more error-prone resources in front of that?" he asks. "If not, how do you give young lawyers the training and exposure that they need to develop a skill- set and gain familiarity with the inner workings of the deal?" Friedman anticipates a thinning out of junior legal jobs as this automation works its way through the industry. It will affect those at earlier stages in their careers. "It's really the hire-backs, and how many junior lawyers firms [we] will be looking to keep," he says. is is going to change the shape of the legal workforce, accord- ing to some. Traditionally, law firms have adopted a "pyramid" model for hiring, with a small number of partners at the top fol- lowed by a larger number of senior associates and a still larger pro- portion of juniors at the bottom. Expect that to change, says Paul Paton, dean of law and Wilbur Fee Bowker professor of law at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Edmonton. "You have a few associates, a fair number at the senior associate junior partner level, and then a few senior partners, so you can envision a diamond." is thinning will have a knock-on effect for law schools, an- ticipates Warren Smith. He is managing partner at e Counsel Network, a company focusing on legal recruitment. "You'll end up with this gap," he says, arguing that a scarcity of jobs for new legal graduates could affect law schools' student in- take, on which they rely for tuition fees. "If the law firms don't take them, then the law schools will be faced with a more challenging question," he says. If the probability of a well-paying job and a secure career path aer law school de- creases, then students may be less willing to invest large amounts in a shiing career. Smart students may instead decamp to other sectors with more certain futures, he says. Engineering, medicine and technology all spring to mind. If law schools don't address this issue, then Smith anticipates a gradual erosion of well-trained feedstock for the legal sector. "You can't run the legal profession on no new hires. At some point, the law industry falls in on itself," he warns. He would like to see the legal industry must move to stop that brain drain before it becomes a problem. is change in opportunities for legal students might become BUSINESS MODELS WE HAVE SEEN THESE SPINNING UP OVERNIGHT AND REQUIRING SKILLS AND THEN WE SEE THIS RACE TO COMMODITIZE THE SKILLS." KRISTA JONES, MARS NEW THAT ARE NOT [TRADITIONALLY] IN DEMAND,

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