Author archives

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Associate Professor of Law, University of Oregon. Professor Tippett writes about ethics, employment law, and the intersection of law and technology. She is a co-author of the Fifth Edition of the West Academic textbook, Employment Discrimination & Employment Law: The Field as Practiced, along with Samuel Estreicher & Michael Harper. Her research on disparate impact litigation was cited by the United States Court of Appeals and the Iowa Supreme Court. Professor Tippett is the Faculty Co-Director for the Master’s Program in Conflict and Dispute Resolution at the University of Oregon. Before joining the faculty, Professor Tippett was an employment law attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Professor Tippett earned her law degree at Harvard Law School in 2006.

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