As the good book doesn’t quite say, there will be more joy in legal circles over one futurologist who repents his enthusiasm for robot lawyers than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance. So Obiter detected a certain amount of smugness last week over reports that Professor Richard Susskind, author of books with titles like The End of Lawyers? and The Online Court and the Future of Justice, had recanted his view that machines are about to take over vast swaths of lower-value legal work. Such smugness may be premature, however. On closer inspection, Susskind’s Harvard Law paper, w...