Jomati reports on legal futures Jomati is publishing a series of in-depth reports on key legal issues. All reports are carefully researched and are full of statistical data. They are also backed up by numerous off-the-record interviews with leading lawyers and general counsel. Please contact tony.williams@jomati.com if you would like any of the following reports: November 2014 - ‘Civilisation 2030: The Near Future for Law Firms’. In this report, ‘Civilisation 2030: The Near Future for Law Firms’ we explore what will be the impact on clients and law firms of three key factors that shape the global economy: demographics, the growth of global cities and megacities, as well as the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics into both the industrial and professional sectors. June 2014 - ‘Internal Frontiers: Law’s Organisational Challenge’. June 2013 - ‘Turning Point: Offshore Law Firms in a Changing World'. May 2013 - ‘Global Balance: Law, BRICs and the Developing World’. June 2010 – ‘Evolution or Revolution?
Your Lawyer May Soon Be an Algorithm The robotic revolution has been predicted to spread its techno-tendrils far and wide in the job market, and a recent report by UK consultancy firm Jomati Consultants suggests that they’ll be creeping ever further into the legal profession by 2030. The report suggests that the “economic model of law firms is heading for a structural revolution, some might say a structural collapse.” While robots stealing jobs is nothing new, that lawyers could see their jobs be automated might seem surprising on the surface. In a much-publicised 2013 report that predicted 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of automation in the next two decades, authors Carl Frey and Michael Osborne put lawyers at comparative low risk of robotic replacement. But some jobs in law find themselves at the riskier end of the spectrum. That’s less surprising; the general trend seems to be that high-paying jobs are much safer from robotisation than low-paying jobs. AI making legal decisions is a compelling idea.
If Schools Don't Change, Robots Will Bring On a 'Permanent Underclass': Report Robots are taking all the jobs. But are we, the average, moderately skilled humans, screwed, or aren't we? Let me just get it out of the way now: We are, unless there are drastic, immediate changes to education and economic systems around the world. The dominant narrative going around today about Pew Research's new report on artificial intelligence and the future of jobs is that experts can't really decide whether automation is going to make working obsolete, that it's really a toss up whether robots will simply create new jobs in other sectors as they destroy ones in other. That's true, in one sense: The 1,896 futurists, CEOs, journalists, and university professors questioned for the report were split in half over robots will "displace significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers," with 52 percent of respondents agreeing that "human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."
Don't Fear the Robots Taking Your Job, Fear the Monopolies Behind Them As algorithms and automatons start to code and roll their way into our workplaces, there’s a looming sense that employment is set for a pretty major shift. Maybe not quite yet, but slowly and surely, the robots are showing themselves to be capable of taking on jobs once held by humans. They’re more accurate than us, more consistent; they run for longer, they’re satisfied with their work (or at least not unsatisfied), and they don’t kick up a fuss about a living wage. But to worry about robots “stealing our jobs”—an oversimplified rhetoric that sounds all too familiar—is to ignore the greater potential upheaval in our economy. That future societal change was the subject of discussion at a panel last night hosted by Nesta in London, which brought figures from the fields of technology and economics together to share some of the visions conjured by their crystal balls. Izabella Kaminska, a financial blogger at FT Alphaville, went for the jugular of the argument.
LEGAL FUTURES Report: artificial intelligence will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030 1 December 2014 AI: computers that ‘think’ spell doom for many lawyers 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 human part of lawyering would shrink. By Dan Bindman
Robot-writing increased AP’s earnings stories by tenfold | Poynter. Since The Associated Press adopted automation technology to write its earnings reports, the news cooperative has generated 3,000 stories per quarter, ten times its previous output, according to a press release from Automated Insights, the company behind the automation. Those stories also contained “far fewer errors” than stories written by actual journalists. The Associated Press began publishing earnings reports using automation technology in July for companies including Hasbro Inc., Honeywell International Inc. and GE. Appended to those stories is a note that reads “This story was generated automatically by Automated Insights ( using data from Zacks Investment Research. Full GE report: The stories include descriptions of each business and contain “forward-looking guidance provided by the companies,” according to the release. Automation has been used to generate content before. Here’s the release:
Kurzweil Responds to 'When Robots Are Everywhere, What Will Humans Be Good For?' [Video] - Singularity HUB Lately, media around the web has been bracing for robots — not time-traveling robots per se, but robot workers. Specifically, the increased sophistication of artificial intelligence and improved engineering of robotics has spurred a growing concern about what people are going to do when all the regular jobs are done by robots. A variety of solutions have been proposed to this potential technological unemployment (we even had an entire Future of Work series dealing with this topic in March), many of which suggest that there will still be things that humans can do that robots can't, but what are they? During a Q&A session at an Executive Program hosted at Singularity University last October, one participant had the opportunity to prompt Ray Kurzweil with the question, "What do you think humans will be uniquely suited to do in the future?" "We're constantly creating and inventing new jobs and things to do." To learn more about Singularity University's Executive Programs, click here.
The End of Meaningless Jobs is a Win For Us All Many experts studying the topic of automation believe that the current rate of advancement is leading us into a future with fewer and fewer available jobs. Maybe that’s a good thing. In his 2013 essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber argued that in the wake of automation, we created employment for employment’s sake, not necessarily to fulfill any significant task or purpose. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that automation would create a 15-hour work week for everyone in Britain and the United States. Graeber argues that we failed to live up to this prediction, not because of a failure of automation, but because of the fear of the social effects that would occur when large numbers of people had large amounts of unstructured time. In our current system, higher unemployment rates mean an unstable economy. In 2014, the Conference Board Job Satisfaction Survey reported, for the eighth time in a row, that less than half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs.
On-Demand Employment: How Today’s Workers Are Choosing Journeys Over Jobs The American industrialist Henry Ford, regarding diminishing customer surveys on early cars, once famously quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” What’s less widely known is that Ford was one of the first employers in the world to implement a five-day workweek in factories beginning in 1926. Close to a century later, we’ve observed innovation in automobile technology, especially in recent years with self-driving cars, but the way we work has not changed to nearly the same extent. Today’s workers, especially among my generation, the Millennials, are questioning whether work must be this way. Recently, a human resource executive mentioned that she doesn’t believe in short term and contractual employment because she as an employer would not want individuals to work independently. Are we on the cusp of a similar massive shift in the workplace? After all, people want to work on what they want wherever and whenever they want. What is Jobbatical?
Trends at Work: An Overview of Tomorrow’s Employment Ecosystem Where will work be in the future? And where will workers be? The economic, social, and technological landscape is shifting rapidly. When we think about the future of work, the first thing we usually want to know is what kinds of jobs will be available, how many, how much they’ll pay, and what we have to do to prepare for them. For example, the current BLS projections for the years 2012 to 2022 show likely growth for the categories of network systems and data communications analysts, personal and home-care aides (also health-care industry human resources, marketing, etc.), computer software engineers (high end), and veterinary technicians (assistants). More job openings are also expected for nurses, health-care technicians and administrators, massage and yoga practitioners, car service and shoe repair personnel, as well as retail salespeople, administrative aides, customer relations, janitorial services, and teaching assistants. How New Jobs Are Created Re-visioning New Job Development
Robert Reich: The Nightmarish Future for American Jobs and Incomes Is Here Photo Credit: via YouTube What will happen to American jobs, incomes, and wealth a decade from now? Predictions are hazardous but survivable. The first category I called "routine production services," which entailed the kind of repetitive tasks performed by the old foot soldiers of American capitalism through most of the twentieth century -- done over and over, on an assembly line or in an office. I estimated that such work then constituted about one-quarter of all jobs in the United States, but would decline steadily as such jobs were replaced by new labor-saving technologies and by workers in developing nations eager to do them for far lower wages. I was not far wrong. The second category I called "in-person services." I also predicted their pay would drop. Here again, my predictions were not far off. The third job category I named "symbolic-analytic services." Again, I wasn't far off. We are now faced not just with labor-replacing technologies but with knowledge-replacing technologies.