Reading

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Of critical importance in this model is the role played by context — physical, social, and cultural — in shaping the decisions writers make as they compose a text and that readers make as they construct meaning from a text. For writers, context shapes — some might argue that it actually causes — the purposes for writing. Moreover, context affects the opportunities, requirements, and limitations that affect the choices writers make as they compose their documents. For readers, context shapes their attempt to construct meaning as they read.

— The Role of Context in Shaping Purpose and Constructing Meaning, Colorado State University

Before replacing your lawyers with artificial intelligence, consider the lawyer’s basic function: reading.

Consider what “junior legal work” tends to comprise. Reading and interpreting workaday legal contracts: the paradigm case being the confidentiality agreement. It is a tedious, low-value job. Just when sales are on the brink of a grand new conquest, the prospective client fishes around in her handbag and produces an NDA. Sales is ready to go, but first thee legal eagles must have their day. Cue a week or so of tedious, costly, back-and-forth, during which time ardours are in grave danger of dampening.

What to do? Policy says we must review the contract. But surely, in these artificially intelligent times, there is a better way. Could not a hastily-commissioned chatbot handle this?

Good luck on that, soldier. First clue here is that not even the salesperson — supposedly a reflective, emotionally aware, tertiary-educated,1 autonomous intelligent being — can be trusted to review this contract. If she could, you wouldn’t need the legal eagle, would you?

So there is your first hurdle: your chatbot may not need the forensic skills of Cardozo J himself, therefore, but it must at least be better at reading a contract than a salesperson.

And what must that review entail? Reading is more than the mechanical ingestion and processing of a string of symbols. When a lawyer reads a contract she is doing something that even a university-educated salesperson cannot. Reading and interpretation is a dynamic process by which the reader brings her personal metaphorical superstructure — a “schema” — to a text that was composed using a more or less compatible schema. No two schemas are the same — we all have our foibles and unique experiences, and those variances in everyday life account for much of the human condition. Lawyers have their own special meta-schema — one that requires years learning and refinement. The lawyer uses this meta-schema to extract meaning and consequences that are unavailable to laypersons. Legal magic words have special meanings: “indemnity”; “consideration”; “equitable remedy”. Concepts like these have their own intellectual life and a dog-eared, meandering history which one can trace through centuries of dusty law reports. When she reads a contract, a lawyer brings her own imperfect, idiosyncratic impression of that history to her review.

A neural network can have none of this. Nor can it acquire any of it through ingestion of sample texts.

See also

• “Hey legal can you read my emails for me?”