Hey guys, i'm curious my teacher recently told me that lawyers are starting to become more and more obsolete due to advancement and growing in technology and modern medicine, now although i don't plan on becoming a lawyer, this concerns me greatly, will lawyers become greatly or completely obsolete in the future?    

I don't think that's a fact people ate always going to need someone to defend their rights and advocate for them

Eventually, it's possible that anything and everything could be replaced by machines, computers and robots.

 

This video is a bit long, but it makes a good point. A startling one at that. (Go to 9:13, it discusses lawyers.)

 

Seems like humans are destroying themselves, and bringing everything else down with them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqk-CLxrW6s&sns=em

A lot of tasks that used to be done by associates have been replaced by technology: law involves a LOT of sifting through tons of papers, cataloging them, and cross-referencing things, all of which can now be done using technology. The video's discussion of that is pretty much right. Now, the ultimate thing lawyers are most paid for is *not* document review, it's actually giving legal advice and/or arguing in trials (not all fields of law involve going to court very often). The video briefly touches on drafting documents (automation helps by keeping better track of drafts like through Word's "track changes", but isn't actually *making* the substantial changes) and predicting the outcome of a particular course of action, but doesn't go into much depth about it - that task tends to be hard, in a way that robots are worse at than most people think (and incidentally, there are legal barriers to using a robot for this commercially -- the practice of law is restricted to licensed attorneys, and there are regulatory hurdles [e.g. liability for malpractice] that have to be overcome before it can actually see use; the same applies to the practice of medicine). But lots of the low-level tasks are already being/have been replaced with computer programs.

There's also been a big change happening in law with law school no longer being the near-guarantee of a middle-class legal job that it once was -- there are now far more law school graduates than there are legal jobs, and so graduates now face a similar issue to people finishing undergrad where there aren't many jobs that will let them pay off their debt. The top end of the legal profession salary- and job security-wise, large law firms (aka Biglaw and/or white shoe firms), are also changing: it used to be much easier for an associate at a big firm to become a partner, whereas now it's much, much more competitive; instead of being mostly just "associate" or "partner", lawyers are increasingly getting promoted from an associate to another salaried position, instead of actually becoming true partners (part of this is that these firms are also in financial trouble, because clients are less and less willing to spend lots of money for what amounts to training young associates).

Well I just got done watching the video, now that I know that the advancement of technology is inevitable, I got to thinking, I want to get a PHD in computer science, now with all these bot programs, I was thinking, gee is getting a degree in computer science pretty much worthless now?

Come on, really? Lawyers? Obsolete? Do you really think people would want to give up suing everyone?

You know I will say this though one job I don't see being too much affected is cameramen who film movies.

If your rights can be taken from you IE: Arrest, there will always be a job for a lawyer and don't forget bail bondmen.

But what I see is good lawyers struggling. A lot of firms are only after money. I know of one lawyer who quit his high class firm to open is own practice. Because he did not like how things were ran.

Hell law runs in my family. There is a school in New York named after my 6x great grandfather. I'm glad I wasn't named after him which is my fathers name and so on.

Don't be too quick rule out a law degree. It's a hard road. But it can be rather rewarding.

It's sad to say, but my local courts have lost touch with Lady Justice.