Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.
It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.
It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.
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It's not really the case that demand for lawyers is lower (recession aside). It's that the growth in demand for lawyers is lower than it has been. Remember, we're dealing with derivatives here: the number of new jobs available for new graduates is the derivative of overall legal demand.
I don't think technology has had much to do with it, except within certain segments (mainly document review). As technology has evolved, expectations have risen. Yes, you can get on Lexis and quickly look up the case law on an issue, instead of heading over to the library and poring through books, but countering that is the fact that now you're expected to be on top of the absolute latest precedent. It's not enough to give the definition of some element out of a legal encyclopedia. Gotta make sure you review all the cases that touch on the topic to make sure nothing adds a wrinkle that your opponent might bring up.
Similarly with document review. Yes, predictive coding will blow through thousands of documents a second, but back in the day you could just interview some people to get the story of what happened. Now you're expected to review every e-mail everyone sent within the relevant time period. Even with technology, someone has to piece those e-mails together into a coherent narrative.
What really happened is that during the 1970's and 1980's, the corporatization and financialization of America caused demand for legal services to explode relative to GDP. We seem to have hit a plateau in that process in the late 1990's and 2000's, which has caused the growth in demand to stagnate, and indeed dip in the recent recession.
http://www.autonomy.com/content/Customers/verticals/legal/in...
Also, prediction: when everyone has Google Glass, the discovery demands will explode again until someone invents software that figures out what is happening in a video.
It is true that the _costs_ of legal research has decreased, since it is now easier and faster to find cases, but that generally does not extend to lawyers, but rather to legal assistants, librarians, paralegals, and whatnot. Law is still an extremely contextual field, and computers are very bad at dealing with realities of multiple complex interacting systems (as laws generally are). I would love to one day see computers spit out answers to legal questions, but as for today, I don't think that a computer could argue a case for me in court.