Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place. There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge. Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even millions of files to search. Digital offices great many many many more files than pre digital offices.

OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company.

Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects.

The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap.

I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.