AI will improve the legal profession, not eliminate lawyers

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge that he believes AI will make the legal profession better.
• Pichai said more people could become lawyers because laws and legal systems aren’t going away.
• AI can have unintended consequences, but he said there will be more lawyers in the next decade.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes artificial intelligence will make the legal profession better, and said he would “almost bet” there will be even more lawyers in 10 years.

In an interview with The Verge, Pichai said that although AI could have unintended consequences for the profession, he believes more people will become lawyers. The fundamental reason for the existence of the system will not disappear, it is a human problem.”

Twenty years ago, people predicted that technology would obliterate entire occupations, but “it hasn’t fully happened,” Pichai said. “It’s not exactly clear” how AI will affect jobs in the future, he said.

“I think there will be massive disruptions in the social labor market,” Pichai said. “We need government engagement. We need adaptation. Skills development will be important. But I also think the positive aspects of these things should not be underestimated.”

legal services Jobs such as paralegals and legal assistants are among the top roles likely to be replaced by AI, an expert previously told Insider. The legal industry has a handful of roles, and those jobs were already being automated by AI before the rise of popular generative AI tools like ChatGPT, experts told Insider.

“In fact, the data is very structured and very language-oriented, which makes it very suitable for generative AI,” McKinsey Global Institute partner Anu Madgavkar told Insider.

However, Madgavkar said AI cannot fully automate legal work because human judgment is still required to meet the demands of customers and employers. Rather, Madgavkar said it was more of a “productivity boost.”

Pichai told The Verge that he believes “governments and legal systems always have to grapple with the same set of problems” when new technology comes along. He said it was comforting to see people trying to think ahead about potential downsides of AI, saying, “We need to anticipate it as soon as possible.”

In an interview with 60 Minutes in April, Pichai said of AI, “It’s the deepest technology we’ve been working on. It’s deeper than fire or electricity or anything else we’ve done in the past.”

Google released its own AI chatbot, Bard, in March and unveiled a new AI-powered search engine at Google I/O this week.

Listen to Pichai’s conversation with The Verge here.