What I’m Reading: ‘The Future of the Professions’

I work at the intersection of two information-service professions — higher education and law. Trying to understand how technology-related disruptions in these professions will affect law schools brought me to Richard and Daniel Susskind’s The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford University Press, 2015).

The book argues provocatively that artificial intelligence will most likely simulate many professional skills now considered the hallmark of humans.

One does not have to accept this radical premise, however, to benefit from the authors’ framework for understanding the topic. So, with tools provided by the book, I have a couple of thoughts for legal education.

As for how we teach, law schools have been slow to adopt blended online-learning techniques. The imperative to do better by our students means that attempts to integrate traditional casebook and Socratic teaching with interactive online graphics, animations, and gaming materials will probably come to fruition. First adopters will do better at educating students and will gain a reputational advantage.

As to what we teach, if the Messrs. Susskind are even remotely correct, much of the routine work that lawyers do will become the province of artificial intelligence. The premium at law schools will increasingly be on higher-order, systems-theory learning that gives students the ability to function holistically at the intersection of law, business, and governance.

Perhaps we might call that cognitive skill thinking like a (human) lawyer.