Attorney Lin Shang-lun's Special Column: AI will not replace lawyers, but will bring legal services to an unimaginable dimension

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Will lawyers be replaced by AI? If you still hold this view, you had better quickly absorb the perspectives of industry insiders. (Background: Attorney Lin Shang-lun's column: AI will not replace lawyers, but will bring legal services to an unimaginable dimension) (Background: Attorney Lin Shang-lun's column: With the GSAT results released, university students really shouldn't choose liberal arts) As a lawyer, I once felt anxious about AI. Watching the speed at which AI writes legal briefs and analyzes cases—the efficiency where "a lawyer's workload can be amplified a hundredfold"—intuitively led me to a conclusion: 99% of lawyers in the market will likely be unemployed in the future. After all, when one person's output equals that of a hundred, and the total market demand for lawyers won't suddenly skyrocket out of thin air, where will all those extra people go? But I soon realized that this conclusion ignores the most fundamental thing: human desire is infinite. When a service becomes readily available due to a technological revolution, human demand for that service does not remain the same; instead, it follows suit on a scale of ten thousand times, sprouting brand-new and more sophisticated imaginations on the old foundation. This is nothing new; it is a historical pattern that repeats itself. Let us first rewind to the era before the printing press became widespread. At that time, "knowledge" and "stories" were extremely expensive luxuries. A hand-copied book required months or even years of a monk's painstaking effort, and only royalty and the church could afford to collect them. The only way for commoners to hear legendary stories was perhaps to gather under a bridge and listen to a storyteller's oral performance. However, Gutenberg's movable type printing press completely changed all of this. The production cost of books plummeted, and knowledge was no longer the patent of the powerful. When everyone could afford a book, did those who told stories on the streets lose their jobs? Quite the contrary. As the general public's level of knowledge improved, their taste and requirements for stories also rose accordingly. Thus, exquisite scripts, magnificent operas, and later movies and TV series emerged. When a service becomes readily available, humans develop more extraordinary imaginations for it; this is the best proof. The same script played out again during the Industrial Revolution. Before the invention of the loom, exquisite fabrics were a symbol of the nobility, and commoners could only wear simple clothes made of coarse linen. But when assembly-line production made high-quality cloth cheap, people's needs did not stop at "everyone having clothes to wear," but sprouted a pursuit of tailoring, design, and coordination, creating a massive fashion industry. And the history of the automobile is a classic case: before assembly-line production, cars were handmade luxuries that only a very few could own. But after production efficiency leaped, cars became a means of transport accessible to everyone, and the total demand of society expanded more than ten thousand times. This pattern applies not only to physical goods but also to professional services. In the era without calculators, "precise calculation" was also an extremely noble service. Only large merchant houses, like the ancient Huizhou merchants, could afford to hire people to calculate accounts with an abacus. But after calculators and Excel appeared, precise financial management turned from a luxury into a necessity; any small company, or even a household, could do it, and the total demand of society for accounting and calculation actually surged. History has proven time and again: a leap in production models never brings replacement, but rather a ten-thousand-fold growth in new desires and new demands. All of this is fundamentally the same as the impact of AI on the legal profession. What AI does is simply bring the ancient professional product of "legal services" into an era where it can be produced with high precision and in large batches. From lawyers writing briefs, prosecutors organizing evidence, to judges making judgments, the efficiency of these links will be improved a hundred or a thousand times due to AI assistance. Therefore, when many people are still shouting, "Lawyer fees haven't risen in twenty years, it's unreasonable," I don't entirely agree. Thirty years ago, writing a legal brief required engraving on a steel plate and finding a specialized typing shop; translating a foreign document was even more time-consuming. Now, we have computer typing, cloud storage, and online translation. The cost for a lawyer to "produce" a legal brief has already dropped significantly. With the addition of AI, this cost is shrinking exponentially. Under such a trend, why should the price of the service rise against the trend? When production costs decrease, service prices naturally fall. When lawyer fees are no longer high and the efficiency of court judgments increases dozens of times, what will happen? What will happen is: everyone can afford it, and everyone will want to use legal services. This will completely subvert

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