9. What assessment has the Counsel General made of the impact of automation on the legal services sector? OAQ51729

The Welsh Government continues to work closely both with academia and the legal services sector to understand the impacts and opportunities that automation is likely to bring. 

Well, like all industries that have repetitive elements, the legal services sector is especially vulnerable to automation. Some estimates suggest that 39 per cent of jobs in the legal sector could be replaced by algorithms and machines within the next 20 years. We can just imagine, in law firms where currently large numbers of people are occupied doing repetitive tasks, document searches and trawling through files, these can be easily done within seconds by new and emerging technology. Now, this is happening and it can't be stopped. The question for our Government, and all governments, is what can we do to try and shape this? And would the Counsel General investigate what opportunities there are for the legal sector in Wales to get ahead of this, to adapt and to see whether or not we can lead the way in this sector?

Well, the Member's question focusing on repetitive and tedious tasks takes me back to the early years of my practising career, so, thank you for that moment of nostalgia there.

But the serious answer to the Member's question is that there are obviously risks here, but there are also opportunities. I was pleased to see recently the launch at Swansea University of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Law, which really is intending to explore some of these risks and opportunities for the legal services sector in Wales. It held a conference at the end of January this year where it focused not just on the challenges, but, importantly, on those opportunities. They talked about cognitive computing as being a key area in law, including disciplines such as natural language processing, semantic indexing and data science.

Technology forms a key disruptor, of course, as well as an opportunity, and there are two key technologies forming the basis for the digitisation of law beyond law firms, in the court service, for example, and in particular in family, criminal and corporate law. Both robotic process automation and artificial intelligence are already playing a significant role here. In the US, the legal market there has started in a small way to use IBM's Watson cognitive computer, where the user asks questions in plain English and gets a response, having trawled through the entire body of law, and a legally reasoned answer with cited footnotes, which is an extraordinary development, actually. What this enables lawyers and law firms to do—as he identifies in his question—is move away from the more mainstream activities into more higher value legal work and customer engagement. There are software packages that enable law firms to analyse the patterns that judges have taken in taking their decisions, or the arguments that other lawyers have made in their cases, which is an extraordinary thing, moving us beyond instinct and half recollection into data-driven legal practice. So, I'm pleased that the initiatives such as the Swansea University centre, which is in within the Hilary Rodham Clinton faculty, have got under way.

There is a critical dimension to this, that this is not just available for commercial law, but it's also available for the justice system and for people bringing cases in small claims courts and for whom legal aid is not currently available and for whom access to the system itself is prohibited. We need to make sure that the benefits of these technologies are harnessed for the entire system, not simply for the high-value, high-end, corporate litigation, if you like.

Thank you very much, Counsel General.