Rethinking the Legal Profession in the Age of ML

By now, Machine Learning is soundly in the public domain as its wide impact is being felt across many industries around the world as they go through digital transformations. Although the spearheading ML applications have come from the usual suspects such as Internet companies and software firms, the waves of automation and data-driven decision making have been recently crushing on the shores of the Legal Services industry (article in Spanish). A typical law firm in the Western world employs tens or even hundreds of attorneys specializing in different practice areas e.g., intellectual property, corporate, civil, criminal, constitutional law. The business of legal services remains perhaps the very definition of a human-driven industry essentially relying on increasing the employee count to be able to scale to higher revenues. Such growth no doubt may present some efficiencies, but there's no evidence of strong network effects letting few players dominate the market.