Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the "structural collapse" of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged. Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with "peak humanity" occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people. This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called "geriatric-tech" related IP. The report's focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. "It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030… after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed."

For those thinking of law school, keep in mind that technology may revolutionize the profession before you earn that J.D. In the research-driven, labor-intensive legal profession, the age-old question of man vs. machine is being answered as some law firms have begun to use an "artificially intelligent attorney" to research and hash out legal issues – a trend that legal minds predict will displace some human lawyers. Called ROSS, the robot lawyer uses IBM's cognitive computer program Watson to learn from experience to gain speed when answering legal questions, according to its creators. It can read through the entire body of law to return a cited answer, monitor the law to recognize other court decisions that could affect the case at hand, and even glean conclusions from more than one billion legal documents per second, they add. Its creation comes on the heels of a 2014 analysis that predicted artificial intelligence will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030. As for the robo-lawyer, one law professor said the technology will displace some workers.