It seems to me that the future of legal service could involve much fewer lawyers. After several iterations from now, there should be a future where clients can pose legal questions and receive useful and actionable answers and documents at low to no cost. I'd like to help move things that way.
The obvious thought is through crowdsourcing; but where others have tried, they report: "Turns out, [lawyers] don’t like technology, and they don’t like to share things." Much could be standardized through massive data mining and AI implementation. Knowing as little as I do about either, I imagine it would start with combing jurisdictions that have online case filings, starting by defining outcomes (winners and losers in cases), working backwards through the filings that led to those results, checking the accuracy of, and re-researching, the legal resources employed in each, and rebuilding strategies and answers from there. Fine tuning may require professional buy-in for truly unique situations. However, nothing is truly unique, and if AI advances as expected it could likely provide the analysis needed or the stepping stones toward the analysis needed (See rossintelligence.com).
Is it useful, and if so, what stands in the way?