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Thursday, June 21, 2012

Well, this is good news. Not.

OK, just in case this, this, this and   this didn't make you nervous about the future of the practice of law, maybe this article in The Atlantic will:

After decades of killing low-end jobs in retail, software is finally doing the people's bidding by creating a world with fewer lawyers.
In discussing this  article in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic (the WSJ article is behind a paywall, so go to The Atlantic) did not sound optimistic about the future of the practice of law and, more specifically, Temp Town's piece of the action:
For a while now, attorneys have employed manual keyword searches to sort through the gigabytes of information involved in these case. But as the journal reports, more firms are beginning to use a technology known as "predictive coding," which essentially automates the process at one-tenth the cost. Recently, a magistrate judge in a major Virginia employment discrimination suit ruled that the defense could use predictive coding to sort through their own data, despite objections by the plaintiffs who worried it might not pick up all the relevant documents . . .
 At this point, most temps who have been at this for more than a few weeks have been on a project that used predictive coding at some point, even if they didn't know it. In my opinion, having seen it at work, predictive coding sucks. It simply isn't very good -- yet. It's going to get better, and it is a much bigger threat to us and our livelihood than India or Ohio or Charlotte or any of the other serious and real threats to Temp Town. So, what's your exit strategy?

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