Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - 4 views
-
Karen M on 03 Apr 11The stakeholders in this article are lawyers, clients, the software developers, and law firms. The social and ethical issue is people and machines, more specifically, the fact that software is replacing the work of "armies of expensive lawyers." The area of impact is business and employment. The issue here is that law firms are now starting to use this new software in order to replace spending a lot of money of many lawyers to get the same job done. Law firms are able to save their money by investing in this software instead of multiple lawyers. They are also able to save time because the software is able to go through information faster than humans are able to. Clients are also able to save their money because they are paying law firms less to get the same job done. This is a chain reaction. The software developers are also able to make more money now that this is becoming more popular because they are able to continue building on and improving the software they have now and then selling it later on. The issue is that lawyers are being replaced by this new software. A job that used to take 500 lawyers, could now take 1 lawyer, along with this new software. This is an important issue to pay attention to because eventually it might lead to unemployment, even though there are no signs of it now.
-
Jaymee C on 06 Apr 11This was a pretty interesting article and I actually enjoyed reading it. You seem to have hit all the points and from the article what really stood out to me was when Bill Herr said,"People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't." This is basically the issue that we are faced with when losing jobs. For those jobs that are repetitive is is more efficent and time saving to have a robot rather than a person doing the job. You hit this point by saying, "A job that used to take 500 lawyers, could now take 1 lawyer, along with this new software." Though I wonder if this is completely a bad thing. You say it is and important issue because it can lead to unemployment, but isn't it also the case that new jobs would arise? Would those jobs be able replace or be more than what was lost?