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 going nap on the idea of artificial intelligence putting lawyers out of work, it is worth considering the basics of what what lawyers do. Namely, reading. Reading is not simply the process of ingesting a string of symbols. However, this is all any contemporary artificial intelligence can do. Even a deep neural network.

If your think junior legal work can be easily replaced by a chatbot, you will be disappointed. Consider what junior legal work tends to comprise. The paradigm case is reviewing a confidentiality agreement. It is a tedious low-value job. Just when hanky-panky is on the cards, dear client presents amorous salesperson with a confi. Randy salesperson knows the rules: all legal contracts must be approved by the legal department full stop there follows an interminable 3-day back and forth while the lawyers duke your out. This costs money and dampens ardours.

Could not a hastily-commissioned chatbot handle this?

First clue here is that not even the salesperson — a fully specified, tertiary-educated autonomous intelligent being — can be trusted to do this. If she could, why bother having the legal guy?

Your chatbot may not have to be an excellent lawyer, therefore, but to have a job it must at least be better at reading than a salesperson.

Bear in mind what a lawyer does when she reads a contract. What is she doing that not even a university educated salesperson can do? reading and interpretation is a dynamic process. She is bringing a rich metaphorical structure, that she has spent literally years learning and refining — the English common law — to the text. Through this metaphorical structure she extracts meaning and consequence that is entirely unavailable to her colleague in sales. Magic words have special meanings: "indemnity". "Consideration". "Equitable remedy". Each of these concepts has its own intellectual life, and dog-eared meandering history, traceable through centuries of dusty law reports. The lawyer brings her own imperfect, idiosyncratic impression of that history to her review of the confi.

A neutral network can have none of this. Not can it acquire any of it through ingestion of sample texts.