Make decisions in legal cases.
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 3 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Making Decisions and Solving Problems (4.A.2.b.1) |
What could do this work.
These are the categories of tool that address judgment, authorisation and strategy, with a few live examples from our landscape. We name the category rather than promise that a specific product does your specific task, because that promise would not be true.
Generalist agents
Models and routing
Categories are matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Before committing to any of them, check that the tool can reach the system your record actually lives in. That connection, not the model, is where most of these projects stall.
Who does this work.
3 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it.
O*NET groups these under “Make legal decisions”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Rule on admissibility of legal proceedings | 3 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.