That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?
One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era."
I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s.
In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.
OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification.
This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade.
I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene.
I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.
OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company.
Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects.
The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap.
I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.
Before the spreadsheet, one didn't run what if analyses with 100 different variables.
I've also been told that, while it's certainly true that it's easier to search for relevant cases, etc., a lot of what does is raise the expectation that you will in fact find and make use of all of the most relevant cases.
Corporate America Sending More Legal Work to Bombay | MARCH 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/jobs/corporate-america-sen...
Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers | AUG. 4, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.ht...
Keeping Legal Work From Moving to India | August 6, 2010 http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/keeping-legal-w...
Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers | JUNE 2, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03reverse.html
There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible.
There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.