A Note to the Sceptic

You are right to be cautious.

If you have spent twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years mastering the intricate geography of Sri Lankan law — knowing precisely where to find that one paragraph in Silva v. Fernando that everyone else has forgotten, understanding the subtle interplay between our Roman-Dutch inheritance and the statutes of a newly independent nation, carrying within your mind a living map of precedent stretching back to 1843 — then it is entirely reasonable to look upon this new arrival with suspicion.

Another technology. Another promise. Another young person telling you that everything you know is about to become obsolete.

We understand. And we respectfully suggest that you have been here before.

I. The Gutenberg Anxiety (1450)

When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, he did not merely invent a machine. He detonated an explosion beneath the foundations of an entire intellectual economy.

Consider the position of the medieval legal scribe. Here was a professional whose value derived from scarcity — the scarcity of legal texts, laboriously copied by hand, jealously guarded in monastery libraries and court archives. A lawyer's power rested substantially upon access: access to documents that others could not obtain, knowledge that others could not acquire.

The printing press threatened to demolish this edifice entirely. If anyone could purchase a printed copy of Justinian's Digest, what became of the scholar who had spent decades memorising it? If legal texts could be reproduced by the thousand, what happened to the mystique of legal knowledge?

The scribes, understandably, were horrified. Some predicted the collapse of legal standards. Others foresaw a profession overrun by amateurs wielding their dangerous new access to information.

What actually happened? Legal documentation exploded. Contracts became more common, not less. More people required lawyers — not to access the law, but to interpret it. The profession transformed from gatekeepers of scarce texts into architects of meaning. The scribes who adapted became printers, publishers, legal commentators. The pie did not shrink. It became a bakery.

II. The Westlaw Terror (1975)

Let us move closer to living memory.

In 1973, a company called Mead Data Central launched something called LexisNexis. Two years later, West Publishing introduced Westlaw. For the first time in history, legal research could be conducted by computer.

The senior partners of that era — your predecessors in scepticism, and honourable ones at that — muttered darkly into their evening whisky. What of the young associates who spent years learning the library? What of the art of knowing which shelf held which volume? What of the hard-won expertise that came from physically inhabiting the law, from knowing the weight and smell and location of every relevant tome?

A single search for "trial by jury" could cost five thousand American dollars in those early days. And yet, despite the expense, despite the primitive technology, despite the dial-up modems that failed embarrassingly at the first demonstration in London — the fear was palpable. West Publishing's own president, Dwight Opperman, faced such fierce internal resistance that his board recommended abandoning the entire project and returning to their "core business" of printing books.

They were terrified it would kill their book business. They were terrified of the very future they were building.

And what happened to legal employment? The profession experienced its largest growth in history. In the United States alone, the number of practising lawyers grew from 326,000 in 1970 to 574,000 in 1980 — a seventy-six percent increase in precisely the decade when computerised research arrived. In the United Kingdom, at least sixty London firms employed over one hundred and fifty professional law librarians by 1986. The technology did not eliminate researchers. It promoted them. It freed them from mechanical searching and elevated them to analytical thinking.

The researchers were not replaced. They were liberated.

III. The Calculator and the Accountant

Perhaps you will permit a brief excursion beyond the legal profession, for the parallel is too illuminating to ignore.

The word "accountant" originally meant, quite literally, "one who calculates." The profession's very identity was bound to the mechanical act of computation — adding columns, checking figures, balancing ledgers. When electronic calculators arrived in the 1960s, followed by VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet software) in 1979, the accountant's obsolescence seemed mathematically certain. A machine could now do in seconds what had previously required an entire day of human labour.

The accountants, one might reasonably have predicted, were finished.

Instead, their numbers multiplied. In the United States, accountant employment grew from 339,000 in 1980 to over 1.4 million by 2022. Yes, some four hundred thousand accounting clerk positions disappeared — the purely mechanical roles. But they were replaced by six hundred thousand new accountant positions of a fundamentally different character.

What happened? The spreadsheet enabled something that manual calculation never could: the "what-if" game. Scenario analysis. Strategic modelling. Creative financial thinking. Once the arithmetic became trivial, everyone wanted financial analysis. The accountants who had been human calculators became strategic advisors. The barrier to entry lowered; the demand exploded.

The tool did not replace the thinker. It revealed how much thinking there was left to do.

IV. The ATM Paradox

One more example, if you will indulge me, for it is perhaps the most counterintuitive of all.

When automatic teller machines proliferated across America and Europe in the 1980s, the prediction was obvious: bank tellers would vanish. The machine performed their core function — dispensing cash — without salary, without sick leave, without complaint. Between 1985 and 2002, the number of ATMs in the United States grew from 60,000 to 352,000. A six-fold explosion.

And the bank tellers? Their numbers increased, from 485,000 to 527,000 over the same period.

How can this be? The economist James Bessen of MIT investigated this paradox and discovered two mechanisms at work. First, ATMs dramatically reduced the operating cost of each bank branch, making it economically viable to open more branches. Banks expanded their networks by forty-three percent. More branches meant more tellers — just not tellers who counted cash. Their work transformed. They became relationship managers, financial advisors, sellers of mortgages and investment products. The mechanical work vanished. The human work flourished.

Bessen called this the "Remainder Effect." When you automate some tasks, the remaining non-automated tasks become more valuable, not less.

V. What This Means for You

Let us return, then, to your practice. To your chambers. To your Monday morning.

You are worried — and it is an honourable worry — that artificial intelligence will render your expertise obsolete. That the trainee in the corner, armed with this new technology, will leapfrog decades of your accumulated wisdom. That the careful architecture of your career will be demolished by a machine that can search faster than you can think.

We would gently suggest a different frame.

The trainee with AI and no wisdom is merely faster at being wrong. The senior practitioner with AI becomes formidable.

Consider what AI actually does. It retrieves. It pattern-matches. It summarises. It can find, with remarkable speed, the statute you half-remember, the case that eluded your search, the precedent buried in the archives of 1887. What it cannot do — what it will never do — is reason. It cannot stand before a judge and read the room. It cannot sit with a client facing ruin and help them decide whether to fight or settle. It cannot construct an argument that moves from premise to conclusion with the force of genuine thought. It cannot exercise judgment.

You do these things. You have always done these things. They are not merely tasks; they are acts of advocacy. They are irreducibly human.

What AI offers is not your replacement but your leverage. The research that consumed your morning now consumes your minute. The precedent that required a week in the library now appears in seconds. And what do you do with the time you have recovered? You think. You advise. You strategise. You do the work that made you become a lawyer in the first place — the work that no machine can touch.

VI. The Evidence of Our Own Era

We do not ask you to take this on faith. The evidence is already accumulating.

Harvard Law School recently interviewed the chief operating officers and senior partners of ten of America's largest law firms about artificial intelligence and employment. Their finding was unanimous: not one firm anticipated any reduction in the number of practising attorneys. Some reported that tasks previously requiring sixteen hours could now be completed in three to four minutes — a transformation of almost unimaginable magnitude. And yet they expected total hours worked to remain the same or increase.

Why? Because the work expanded. Because clients who previously could not afford comprehensive legal analysis now could. Because matters that were once economically unviable became profitable. Because the pie grew larger.

The American Bar Association, in its first formal ethics opinion on artificial intelligence, treated the technology not as an existential threat but as a tool requiring professional judgment — no different, in principle, from Westlaw or LexisNexis or the photocopier. The lawyer remains responsible. The lawyer remains essential. The lawyer remains the lawyer.

VII. A Word About Your Archive

AskLex contains the legal memory of Sri Lanka — legislation and case law stretching from 1843 to the present day, supplemented by jurisprudence from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and India. We have included the textbooks you studied, the commentaries you consult, the accumulated wisdom of nearly two centuries of legal practice on this island.

We built this not to replace your knowledge but to honour it. Every search you conduct draws upon the same sources you have always trusted. Every result reflects the same legal tradition you have spent your career mastering. The difference is merely speed — and what you choose to do with the time that speed returns to you.

VIII. The Fear That Isn't New

You stand, today, where lawyers have stood before.

In 1450, watching the printing press threaten to democratise their exclusive knowledge. In 1975, watching the computer terminal arrive in the library. In every generation, watching some new technology and wondering whether this, at last, was the end.

It never was. It never will be.

The law is a human institution, created by humans to govern human affairs. It requires interpretation, judgment, wisdom ෴