Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.
The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.
Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.
Law is relatively cheap to teach compared to the hard sciences and engineering. You can charge students a lot so it is not surprising that universities want to keep the lawyer production pipeline open and gushing.
