Author archives

Charlotte Alexander, Associate Professor of Law and Analytics, Georgia State University. Charlotte S. Alexander holds the Connie D. and Ken McDaniel WomenLead Chair as an Associate Professor of Law and Analytics at the Colleges of Business and Law at Georgia State University. She uses computational methods to study legal text, with a particular focus on understanding how courts process and resolve employment disputes and other types of civil lawsuits. She founded and directs the university’s Legal Analytics Lab, which works toward a legal system that embraces data to solve intractable problems and create a more just society. Alexander has published in journals including Science, the N.Y.U. Law Review, Texas Law Review, the American Business Law Journal, and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, and private foundations. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Robots are coming for the lawyers – which may be bad for tomorrow’s attorneys but great for anyone in need of cheap legal assistance

Imagine what a lawyer does on a given day: researching cases, drafting briefs, advising clients. While technology has been nibbling around the edges of the legal profession for some time, it’s hard to imagine those complex tasks being done by a robot. And it is those complicated, personalized tasks that have led technologists to include lawyers in a broader category of jobs that are considered pretty safe from a future of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. As Professors Elizabeth C. Tippett and Charlotte Alexander discovered in a recent research collaboration to analyze legal briefs using a branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it.

Subjects: AI, Courts & Technology, KM, Legal Marketing