Elaine Ou, Columnist

Why Hire a Lawyer When a Robot Will Do?

Artificial intelligence is learning to do legal grunt work.

September 22, 2016 at 7:00 AM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Cheap and efficient.
Photographer: Paul Gilham/Getty Images

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Lawyers, beware. Robots really are coming for your jobs.

Exhibit A: Venture-capital firm Invoke Capital just made a multi-million-dollar investment in Luminance, which is developing artificial intelligence to automate the legal drudgery involved in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The robot lawyer is just one of many -- including offerings from Ross Intelligence and Kira Systems -- aiming to replace the overworked factotums known as associate attorneys. Without the six-figure student debt, I presume.