Dear Editor,
Guyana seems to be racing ahead with the certification and building of a Law School. But what the country needs now are skillsets associated with its physical and economic development to which the legal profession will not and cannot contribute because of its role in any society. Instead, the country’s priority must be on increasing engineering and business skills required for all infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, ports, electric generating and transmission plants, pipelines, tall buildings, etc., and without such projects, development cannot take place.
The legal profession basically advocates on behalf of clients on issues relating to written law in areas of civil, constitutional, criminal, and corporation, it performs research into relevant facts, and writes new laws usually in verbiage that requires interpretation by other lawyers, a way of ensuring numerical longevity. But besides such advantages given them to bolster their numbers, and including profitable monopolies in conveyancing and probate services, and representation before courts, lawyers are in surplus numbers in many countries, and likely Guyana is one of them.
A few years ago, the New York Times estimated that there were over twenty-seven thousand lawyers in the US for which positions did not exist. They keep fees high through rent-seeking practices thereby increasing their numbers. In Guyana, it is not uncommon to pay $200,000 for a legal letter which is nothing more than a form letter with minimum modifications for personalization.
Further, as there is no analytical work required in the functioning of the legal profession, legal work is easily automated. IBM Watson, a data analytics processor, already performs legal research, often in a fraction of time that humans take. In a recent study analyzing the accuracy in reviewing provisions of five legal non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), an artificial intelligence program achieved 94% accuracy in twenty-six seconds compared to 85% average accuracy for a group of 20 experienced lawyers. The time taken was an average of ninety-two minutes for the “expert” lawyers. And more powerful AIs, such as ChatGPT by OpenAI, are on the horizon. Loss of jobs in the US legal sector–already down 1,000 just in the first quarter of 2018–can be attributed to this development of AI replacing lawyers.
So, rather than be occupied with a dying profession whose skills are already oversubscribed and which make no contribution to development, the country should be making it attractive for an education institution such as Massa Chusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to locate here.
These institutions bring the necessary skills for development, in addition to being a magnet to students from neighbouring countries. This is how China went from a poor country to a super-power in the timeline of fifty years, by flooding the top universities in the US and Europe with its students. This is what our top priority must also be and the quicker, the better. Leave legal schooling alone. The selection of twenty-five students on merit, is more than enough to fill the declining ranks of the profession, and if students do any research on this profession, they will find enough reason to choose another.
Sincerely,
Louis Holder
