I spend a large portion of each day “reading the room”. Reading the Judge, reading the opposing lawyer and/or party, reading the mediator, reading third parties and even reading my own clients to best prepare their case. It requires me to be finely tuned to sense and accurately interpret human emotion. I have found that being thoroughly prepared at every opportunity can help me to read the room as it allows me to very quickly hone in on any cracks which might appear in the other parties case.

Over the last few months, there has been talk of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) potentially “taking” human jobs within society and in particular, this talk has circled the legal profession. This has had me thinking about how a robot or A.I. generally will be able to accurately read the room from an emotive standpoint.

I often spend hours on end researching the latest cases on some of Australia’s leading legal databases to make sure I have the most up to date cases or authorities to support any legal arguments which might be advanced on behalf of my clients. There have been recent reports of lawyers abroad using A.I. to construct these arguments and in one instance, it has now come out that A.I. dreamed up the case law, the Bot created cases that simply didn’t actually ever exist.

I have no doubt (and I remain ever hopeful) that A.I. will have a place to play in law firms in helping us to carry out and streamline procedural or research related tasks. I expect that such tasks will require a high level of prompt expertise by human lawyers and any final product will still be carefully checked by a human lawyer within any practice using it.

The more interesting areas and questions that remain unanswered and may for some time is whether A.I. will be able to read the room in a legal setting and if so, how will that look. Separately to this, engaging a lawyer is quite a personal experience. Will human clients be comfortable in trusting A.I. to read the room if and when it develops this capability?

The mind boggles.