We don’t usually think of the law as the place our most creative people go. Lawyers with a creative bent often drift into business, where a higher risk tolerance is often required to make a success of yourself. Some of our greatest writers and artists have legal training, but most seem to drop out when their artistic calling tells them law school isn’t for them.

Still, creativity and innovation are all the rage in law schools today. Northwestern has a concentration in it as does Vanderbilt, and Harvard has a course on Innovation in Legal Education and Practice.

Like it or not, as artificial intelligence takes over an increasing number of dreary legal tasks, there will be less room for dreary, plodding minds in law firms. The creative and innovative will survive.

This doesn’t worry us, because we’ve long talked about the need for creativity in fact finding. It’s even in the subtitle of my book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.

The book takes up the message we have long delivered to clients: computers can help speed up searching, but computers have also made searching more complex because of the vast amounts of information we need to sort through.

• Deadlines are ever tighter, but now we have billions of pages of internet code to search.
• Information about a person used to be concentrated around where he was born and raised. Today, people are more mobile and without leaving their base, they can incorporate a dozen companies across the country doing business in a variety of jurisdictions around the world.
• Databases make a ton of mistakes. E.g. Two of them think I live in the house I sold seven years ago.
• Most legal records are not on line. Computers are of limited use in searching for them, and even less useful if figuring out their relevance to a particular matter.
• Since you can’t look everywhere, investigation is a matter of making educated guesses and requires a mind that can keep several plausible running theories going at the same time. That’s where the creativity comes in. How do you form a theory of where X has hidden his assets? By putting yourself in his shoes, based on his history and some clues you may uncover through database and public-record research.

The idea that technological change threatens jobs is hardly new, as pointed out in a sweeping essay by former world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the Wall Street Journal.

Twenty years after losing a chess match to a computer, Kasparov writes: “Machines have been displacing people since the industrial revolution. The difference today is that machines threaten to replace the livelihoods of the class of people who read and write articles about them,” i.e. the writer of this blog and just about anyone reading it.

Kasparov argues that to bemoan technological progress is “little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization … Machines that replace physical labor have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds.”

The great challenge in artificial intelligence is to use our minds to manage the machines we create. That challenge extends to law firms. We may have e-discovery, powerful computers and databases stuffed with information, but it still requires a human mind to sort good results from bad and to craft those results into persuasive arguments.

After all, until machines replace judges and juries, it will take human minds to persuade other human minds of the value of our arguments.

Want to know more?

• Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
• Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
• Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.