Legal Artificial Intelligence has made the news’ headlines often, recently. There are chat bots, e.g., that help you appeal against a parking ticket (www.donotpay.co.uk), or give you a first advice if you are considering a divorce (divorce bot). There is software that predicts the likely outcome of court cases. IBM offers legal AI services for eDiscovery and legal research with its Watson supercomputer: Ross, as the service is called, uses Natural Language Processing, and can also be used for cognitive computing, e.g., to review contracts (www.rossintelligence.com). Then there is RPA (Robotics Process Automation) who are creating software robots for law firms. The idea is that any repetitive task that lawyers and paralegals do at a computer can be performed by a software robot. These are two examples of AI doing the work that is often done by paralegals and lawyers.

So, what is the current state of affairs? What is being used and developed within law firms, and what do service providers have to offer when it comes to artificial intelligence for lawyers? Basically, there are three main pillars, where AI is currently being used:

• Research and Data Analysis: Legal Research, eDiscovery, triage services for those two, predictive systems, other analytics (statistics, correlations, etc.),
• Cognitive systems: expert systems, contract review
• Task automation: bots (advice, automate repetitive tasks)

Let us explore these a bit further.

Legal Research: Looking for legal information that is relevant to a case you’re handling? Legal databases are increasingly using AI to present you with the relevant laws, statutes, case law, etc.

eDiscovery: While legal research deals with legal information, eDiscovery focuses on finding evidence that is stored in a digital format. More and more evidence is stored electronically, on computers, smart phones, but also in the cloud (think, e.g., of social media). The task of finding evidence that is pertinent to a case more and more becomes like looking for a needle in a haystack. No wonder that AI is increasingly being used to assist in eDiscovery.

Triage services: So, you have used programs for legal research and eDiscovery. Often that is just the first round, i.e. finding relevant information. If you’re confronted with thousands of results, you need a second round, which is the triage: determining what is most relevant and sorting the results accordingly. Triage services are often built into the software you are using, but are also being offered by independent third party service providers.

Predictive systems: A previous article was dedicated to a software system that could accurately predict the outcome of court cases dealing with Human Rights. It was right in 79% of the cases. Several service providers have announced similar products for other areas of law. But predictive systems are not limited to case outcome predictions. US data scientists have, e.g., developed a new algorithmic analysis they believe could help judges reduce crime by up to 25% in certain situations. The software performs a risk assessment and advises a judge whether a defendant awaiting their court date for an alleged crime should or should not be released to go home before the trial starts.

Other analytics: Machine learning and data mining is also used to provide us with (other) statistics, relevant correlations, etc.

Expert systems: The first cognitive systems already were developed in the 90s. Expert systems are intelligent checklists that have the built-in ability to reason, i.e., perform logical operations and functions.

Contract review: One area where cognitive systems are shining at present is contract review. Important, e.g., is the ability to point out clauses that are lacking in a contract.

Task automation: Bots are intelligent software robots that are created to automate specific tasks. In the introduction of this article, we gave the examples of chat bots that can give advice, and other bots that are being designed to perform any task a lawyer or paralegal does repetitively on a computer.

What does this all mean for lawyers? Richard Tromans, at www.artificiallawyer.com, sums it up perfectly:  ” … the arrival of AI marks a Renaissance for the legal industry because it permits lawyers to be real lawyers again and not tired process units counting down the hours of their day. After all, isn’t the definition of a lawyer a person who is doing something special in society, i.e. taking on a client’s problems and making it their duty to help them? Isn’t that why membership of the profession is so jealously guarded and so heavily regulated? If this is just any other office job, then why all the fuss to become a lawyer? But of course, it’s not just any other office job. In which case, maybe AI is the best thing that has happened to lawyers in many decades.”

Sources

• www.legaltechnews.com/home/id=1202779075878/Separating-Fact-from-Fiction-AI-as-Actually-Used-by-Lawyers-of-Today-and-Tomorrow
• blogs.thomsonreuters.com/legal-uk/2017/02/20/legal-ai-beginners-guide/ (has a link to a report that can be downloaded as a PDF).
• edepoze.com/rise-artificial-intelligence-law/
• www.rossintelligence.com/
• blog.findlaw.com/technologist/2017/02/firm-automates-mundane-tasks-with-software-robots.html
• www.artificiallawyer.com/2017/02/27/algorithmic-justice-study-could-cut-pre-trial-crime-by-25/
• www.law.com/sites/almstaff/2017/01/23/the-artificially-intelligent-future-of-law/
• www.artificiallawyer.com/2017/02/10/ai-and-the-legal-renaissance/