AI and the Legal Renaissance

When AI first reached the ears of the legal market some years ago there was a flurry of stories about the end of lawyers. For years afterward and with Pavlov dogs-like automation any mention of legal AI summoned up the panicked refrain: 'The end of lawyers is coming, the end of lawyers is coming!' This was until law firms and corporates actually started to make use of legal AI systems, especially in the last two years and even more so last year. The clichéd refrain, now exposed to the cleansing light of real experience, seemed to die away upon contact. It turns out there were no androids or already out of date screen grabs from the 2004 Will Smith movie'iRobot' based on the late great Asimov novel.