AI is still a long way from replacing your lawyer

If you listen to some AI-apostles, AI will bury a large proportion of our jobs by replacing humans one task at a time. And this doesn't just apply to the industrial sector – intellectual professions are also beginning to shudder. Lawyers are no exception to the trend, and it's easy to imagine that an AI could supplant staff, since it is capable of completing in a handful of minutes research that can take hours or even days for the small hands of law firms.

The reality is not so simple. "During a trip to New York in 2017, I saw our partners working with IBM's Ross solution, which enabled them to access case law summaries, " recalls Maxime Llerena, a barrister and partner at Schiltz & Schiltz. "However, it was a solution that was difficult to adapt here" because of the difference in legal culture between the United States (and the United Kingdom), where the legal system is based on case law (court decisions that have already been handed down), and Luxembourg (and other European countries), where civil law reigns, i.e. the law is the essential source of law. In practical terms, American law firms need more lawyers to delve into case law than European firms.