The late Paul Rawlinson, former Global Chair of Baker McKenzie, left a multifaceted career legacy:
“Rawlinson, an intellectual property lawyer, achieved a number of triumphs in his professional career, including becoming the first British person to lead the global firm as chairman and overseeing a run of outstanding financial growth during his tenure.
“But a key part of Rawlinson’s legacy is also his public decision to step down from the chairman’s role in October, citing “medical issues caused by exhaustion.” He and his firm’s relative openness about the reasons for taking leave helped stimulate a wider discussion about the mental and physical stresses of the profession.”
Baker McKenzie Chairman Helped Erode Taboos About Attorney Health. The American Lawyer (April 15, 2019)
Inspired by Rawlinson’s decision to step down, several other similarly-situated leaders went public with their own struggles.[1] Among their stressors was the challenge of how to lead their firms to meet the commercial demands of an era when artificial intelligence has already established its superiority over human efforts in legal research, due diligence, and discovery.[2] It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about the erosion of a key aspect of the attorney-client relationship: trust. As Rawlinson wrote last year:
‘‘‘The robots are coming’. It’s fast becoming the mantra of our age. And it comes with more than a hint of threat. I’ve noticed especially in the last year or so the phrase has become the go-to headline in the legal news pages when they report on technology in our industry.
“For our profession – where for thousands of years, trust, diligence and ‘good judgement’ have been watchwords – the idea of Artificial Intelligence ‘replacing’ lawyers continues to be controversial. From law school and all through our careers we are taught that the Trusted Advisor is what all good lawyers aspire to become.
“The fundamental issue is trust. Our human instinct is to want to speak to a human. I don’t think that will change. Trust is what we crave, it’s what separates us from machines; empathy, human instinct, an ability to read nuances, shake hands, and build collaborative relationships.”
Will Lawyers Become Extinct In The Age Of Automation? World Economic Forum (Mar. 29, 2018)
Rawlinson acknowledged that clients are often more concerned with efficiency than preserving the legal profession’s historical trust-building process, demanding instead that “lawyers harness AI to make sure we can do more with less… Put simply, innovation isn’t about the business of law, it’s about the business of business.” As a result, Rawlinson’s goal was to find ways his firm could “use AI to augment, not replace, judgement and empathy.”
Speaking from the client point of view, tech entrepreneur and consultant William H. Saito also weighed in on the issue of trust in an AI world.
“As homo sapiens (wise man), we are ‘wise’ compared to all other organisms, including whales and chimpanzees, in that we can centralize control and make a large number of people believe in abstract concepts, be they religion, government, money or business. .. This skill of organizing people around a common belief generated mutual trust that others would adhere to the belief and its goals.”
“Looking back at our progress as a species, we can distinguish several kinds of trust that have evolved over time.
“There is the ability to work together and believe in others, which differentiates us from other animals, and which took thousands of years to develop;
“trust associated with money, governments, religion and business, which took hundreds of years;
“trust associated with creating the “bucket brigade” of passing packets of data between unfamiliar hosts that is the internet, which took decades; and
“network trust that has enabled new business models over the past few years.
“Not only is this rate of change accelerating by an order of magnitude, but the paradigm shifts have completely disrupted the prior modes of trust.”
This Is What Will Keep Us Human In The Age Of AI, World Economic Forum (Aug. 4, 2017)
Rawlinson asked, “will lawyers become extinct?” Saito asked, “Are we humans becoming obsolete?” Both men wrote from a globalized perspective on big policy issues, and the stress of facing them took its toll. Rawlinson’s case of burnout was ultimately terminal. As for Saito, a fter writing his article on trust, he was discredited for falsifying his resume — something he clearly didn’t need to do, given his remarkable credentials. That he would do so seems appropriate to his message, which was that trust in the AI age is not about human dependability, instead it’s about cybersecurity. I.e., in the absence of human judgment and collaboration, your technology had better be impeccable.
Most of us don’t live at the rarified level of those two men. We live where trust still means “empathy, human instinct, an ability to read nuances, shake hands, and build collaborative relationships.”
Or, as my daughter summed it up when I told her about this article, “Buy local, trust local.”
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.
[1] On May 12, 2019, The American Lawyer introduced a year-long initiative Minds Over Matters: A Yearlong Examination of Mental Health in the Legal Profession “to more deeply cover stress, depression, addiction and other mental health issues affecting the legal profession.”
[2] It’s also changing appellate practice, which makes it easy to predict we’ll soon see AI court opinions.
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