A Primer on Using Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Profession Harvard Journal of Law & Technology

The topic of document digitization and search is explored further in our article on Document Digitization in Finance. The company claims that by combining these three features, the software can better deliver document search results closer to a user’s needs. A lawyer would have to customize the type of information that need to be extracted from scanned documents, and the software will then convert it to searchable text. The software will summarize the extracted documents into a report that can be shared and downloaded in different formats. Opines, “AI and other technologies are enabling machines to take on many of the tasks that many used to think required human lawyers and that’s not plateauing.

With the advent of the web, re­ search on intelligent legal IR is once again flourishing. In truth, the complex technology that would be required to provide direct legal services to clients does not exist. However, there are exciting new AI applications that lawyers are leveraging to provide top-level service at previously unimaginable speeds. For these applications, ethics are less of a consideration because lawyers serve as gatekeepers to retain their firm’s standards of practice. At any intersection of artificial intelligence and law, though, ethical considerations are sure to arise for the foreseeable future.

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Though AI could hypothetically be without error, there’s still no guarantee of a device or software being error-free. Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck our lives, especially during the lockdown, almost every organization started working remotely. The pandemic has forced the legal industry to change court practices and run fully digital, and AI has helped lawyers perform their jobs remotely. Today, the professionals in a firm can access documents from their homes and arrange a video meeting to analyze and decide on a case.

Help your legal team focus on higher-value, more complex legal work, without risking the consistency and integrity of your contract reviews. Gramener Inc is a data analytics and storytelling company that extracts insights from big data using state-of-the-art technology and shares them as stories for easy consumption. AI systems can help them understand the basics of any legal document by simplifying legalese for the clients before they meet in with a lawyer. Departments don’t want mini-lectures on legal theory, and they don’t want meetings every day discussing the legality of promises made or business moves. However, when part of your custom relationship management software includes indexed contracts, for example, everyone stays on board.

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However, this is now a realistic possibility, with the introduction of artificial intelligence promising to be an essential factor of reform in the world of law firms and beyond. Though AI is more likely to aid than replace attorneys in the near term, it is already being used to review contracts, find relevant documents in the discovery process, and conduct legal research. More recently, AI has begun to be used to help draft contracts, predict legal outcomes, and even recommend judicial decisions about sentencing or bail. Like electronic search software, AI-powered legal research software allows lawyers to quickly scan and search large databases of regulations, statutes, practice areas, jurisdictions, case law, etc.

• Get a single platform for the entire due diligence process, including reporting and documentation.
• Furthermore, it can follow up on late payments with the help of process automation algorithms.
• Chatbots can also help guide people on the right path and direct them to a specialist if their case needs one.
• Departments don’t want mini-lectures on legal theory, and they don’t want meetings every day discussing the legality of promises made or business moves.
• The use of AI in law may diminish or enhance how these values are actually expressed within the legal system or alter their balance relative to one another.
• Many such software companies claim that the final document, which could take days by manual human drafting, is generated in a matter of minutes.

Imagine a firm with thousands of reviewed contracts, and you need to keep a copy of their financial obligation, renewal, expiration dates, and more. Considering the size of the legal market, this represents a significant opportunity for value creation. As artificial intelligence, and in particular natural language processing, continue to mature, they will unlock massive opportunities to transform and revitalize the field of law.

AI and the Future of the Legal Profession

However, newer firms would be most likely be begin with a lean, automated, efficiency-driven approach, because they don’t have to deal with the massive existing overhead of larger firms. Case documents and docket entries provide supplementary insights during litigation by lawyers. Current AI tools claim that today’s software products are able to extract key data points from these documents to support arguments. Another tool, Ravel Law, is said to be able to identify outcomes based on relevant case law, judge rulings and referenced language from more than 400 courts. The product’s Judge Dashboard feature contains cases, citations, circuits and decisions of a specific judge that is said to aid lawyers in understanding how judge is likely to rule on a case.

We’ve decided to include contract review, legal research and electronic discovery in this section. Document review, proofreading and legal research can be tedious, mind-numbing work. While these tasks must be completed in the course of competent and ethical representation, no one said that attorneys had to do them! Allowing software to do at least the first round of “heavy lifting” reduces stress and boredom, minimizing the time that attorneys must spend on preliminary or low-level review.

Accurate risk assessment

Jackson and his colleagues give us a window on the use of intelligent information retrieval and extraction in the legal domain. They report on their efforts to apply information extraction techniques to full text court opinions in order to ferret out the linkages between cases. As anyone with even the most casual contact with natural language understanding knows, this is far from a simple task, since cases can be cited and referred to in a daunting variety of ways, and from widely disparate portions of a text. Developing a system that once trained does this automatically and to a level that meets commercial standards is a challenge.

TAR tools, including predictive coding, can be used to review information in real time. This allows lawyers to identify potential risks earlier, advise clients wisely about their exposure and head off legal problems before they even occur. When a lawsuit has been started, or even merely threatened, these smart solutions AI in Law allow law firms to quickly identify relevant information and to define the universe of data and custodians that must be protected. With this increased information, law firms can more accurately assess outcomes, minimizing costs and limiting risks while protecting their clients’—and their own—reputations.

How AI Accuracy in Technology Optimizes Contract Review

This means the machine learning algorithms are trying to understand the meaning of the words, not just match them to keywords. Another example of an AI-powered feature from Westlaw Edge is Quick Check, which uses AI to analyze a draft argument to gain further insights or identify relevant authority that may have been missed. Quick Check can even detect when a case cited has been indirectly overturned. Granted, the information was provided by three clairvoyant mutant humans floating in a milk bath, but I’m going to leave that part out for purposes of this discussion. Taking the concept of predictive coding further, it is now possible to utilize AI to search company records to detect bad behavior before it can bubble to the surface.

Exterro’s law firm clients, they were able to cut down on redundant workers from 100 lawyers down to 5 when they started to employ the system. The software was able to perform the e-Discovery tasks of the lawyers at a 95 percent cost savings according to the law firm. The company claims AOL, Microsoft, and Target among its marquee customers.

• Document review, proofreading and legal research can be tedious, mind-numbing work.
• Plus, most contracts are never seen in a courtroom, so their provisions remain untested and private to the parties.
• Mart argues that search algorithms should be able to generate redundant results on whatever legal online database is used since lawyers need only the most relevant cases.
• Electronic Billing platforms provide an alternative to paper-based invoicing with the goal of reducing disputes on line items, more accurate client adjustments, more accurate reporting and tracking, and reduced paper costs.
• Conducting due diligence often requires legal professionals to review a large number of documents, such as contracts.
• But, artificial intelligence systems can do work in much less time, and thus it is favorable when the main concern is performing a job in as little time as possible.

AI-based solutions like Wevorce offer self-guided solutions for a fraction of the cost while saving a lot of time in the process. Legal experts are available just one click away if the proceeding requires human intervention. These duties can be outsourced to a legal digital assistant, which with the help of Natural Language Processing can gather insights and data. Frequent document reviews serve as good training material to the algorithms. With more documents passing through the AI assistants, algorithms get smarter in recognizing patterns and important facts. Document analysis is a major part of any legal discovery process and also is time-consuming.

• CARA claims to allow lawyers to forecast an opposing counsel’s arguments by finding opinions that were previously used by lawyers.
• This article illuminates AI programs utilizing predictive analytics to solve real world issues.
• Increasingly, technological implementations reduce labor hours, which saves lawyers from unnecessary work and saves clients from unnecessary fees.
• Locate contracts that need to be renegotiated and moved without needing to be renegotiated.
• For companies with hundreds or thousands of contracts, this can be a slow, expensive, labor-intensive, and error-prone process (assuming the contracts aren’t already entered into a robust contract management system).
• When a document is uploaded into the software, the user only needs to select the clauses from the list, and the result tells us which clauses are existing or missing.

Most law firms have yet to use AI-driven solutions, the most successful firms will be the ones embracing the change. Lawyers and in-house counsel that embrace this change could find themselves doing the best work of their careers. Companies and cities all over world are experimenting with using artificial intelligence to reduce and prevent crime, and to more quickly respond to crimes in progress.

The AI builds a model–a set of rules–to distinguish between pandas and koalas. That model might be based on things like size, coloring, the shape of the ears, and what the animal eats . As a way to make the process of law faster and more free from errors or omissions, AI is a welcome tool in the cause of justice. AI may be a more efficient way to resolve civil cases, while at the same time increasing predictability without creating a moral hazard.