Attempting to answer this question is “Watson, Esq. Will Your Next Lawyer Be a Machine?,” an April 13 and 14 conference dedicated entirely to how AI will factor into the future of the legal profession.

The event’s keynote speaker will be Richard Susskind, author of “The Future of the Professions,” which discusses how technology may replace professions like doctors and lawyers, and “Tomorrow’s Lawyers,” which addresses intersections of law with technology and the Web. He is also an advisor for law firms and governments.

The event is ‘the brainchild’ of Larry Bridgesmith, an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt Law who helps coordinate the school’s Law and Innovation program. He said that the event is an “outgrowth” of the program, and that the idea behind the program came from previous work with Susskind. “We just felt like this would be an opportunity to examine what [AI in law] means, what it has meant in the past, and what that may mean in the future,” Bridgesmith said.

The purpose of the event is to “generate dialogue among law firm leaders, legal counsel, in-house, academics, technologists, any of whom are working in the area of machine learning [and] natural language processing,” he said. The focus, he said, is to see “how law can be transformed through these applications.”

Sessions for the event include “Serving Legal Clients with AI,” “From Causal Inference to Predictive Analytics: AI Research by Legal Academics,” and a panel discussion titled “How AI Will Change our World in the Coming Year.”

Lawyers are not always embracing of technology. As Bridgesmith, who is also a lawyer, noted, lawyers “tend to be very urgent” ” in their thinking.

“We’re linear and processs-based. Therefore, we’re looking for a light, quick answer with very little room for risk of failure, not in the sense of being able to adequately represent your client, but failure to try something that may not work the first time. So we’re, as a breed, as a tribe, very inherently resistant. As I say, if it hasn’t happened in the past, it can’t happen – a focus on precedent.”

“As a tribe, we are more reluctant than most, but I say that with recognition that there are many, many people in the legal profession that are looking to be early adopters and sometimes even innovators in this space,” he said.

Resistance, however, may be futile at this point. As Bridgesmith noted, when it comes to tech adoption, “we’ve already turned that corner. And I don’t think there’s any going back on that.”

Among the speakers for the event are Andy Daws, VP of Riverview Law North America, which Bridgesmith described as with “one of the globe’s most advanced legal practice firms.” Daws is the creator of “Kim”, a virtual assistant for helping legal teams make quick and accurate decisions. Also speaking will be Andrew Arruda or ROSS Intelligence, which helped IBM Watson build ROSS, which is marketed as the first AI attorney.

However, Bridgesmith explained, “ROSS is not an attorney on its own. It can assist attorneys at rapid rates to address any of the research issues and natural language sources, but it still takes the discipline and professionalism of a lawyer” to use.

Bridgesmith said that the “immediate questions” of AI in law are, “how can we partner with technology to be more productive in doing work?” and how can we “better serve the needs of clients?”

As to whether AI can replace lawyers, Bridgesmith said that while it isn’t impossible, “We haven’t seen the rapid rate of development that would suggest that it’s in the near term. So if it happens, and many people are arguing it can, it’s not on the near horizon.”