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What about legalzoom.com and similar services? All those wills, patent applications, incorporations, etc. were once performed by legal assistants, paralegals and junior lawyers. Now someone just fills in some forms and ticks off various options. Or think of online insurance quotes, tax preparation and basic accounting again mostly junior level jobs to be sure but this is only the beginning!

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Before legal zoom, and even after it, those things were available in hard copy volumes of model contracts, wills, etc. complete with instructions and optional sections for different uses. The online services streamlined the UX a bit, but it's simply not the case that prior to them all of those documents were prepared individually by professionals. And I suspect that both the books and the online services displaced people doing their own documents without professional assistance as much as taking business from pros.

You're quite right about the books I remember the Self-Help series for all kinds of legal documents, but they were essentially dumb. If the person using those forms made an error it probably wouldn't be caught and could be costly. Modern electronic systems have, what may be described as intelligence, though certainly not understanding, such that user error should be much less common. Also with consumer grade financial software different scenarios can be evaluated and actions suggested based on data analysis; so there's more than just UX improvements occurring in these systems.

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