Computers and Ediscovery

In 2011, the New York Times was telling us about how so-called “electronic discovery” would be putting lawyers out of business by enabling the mass-review of millions of documents for legal cases: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

This is via simple document clustering, which search engines have been getting better and better at for years. An indexing engine can look at vast numbers of documents and “cluster” them around common terms and concepts.

The net of the article basically says that the jobs computers are taking are slowly moving up the scale. More and more, humans are going to have jobs underneath computers

New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.