- Tim Pullan writes..
Gottfried Leibniz, one of the ‘grandfathers of artificial intelligence’, was, amongst other things, a lawyer. And despite dying some 300 years ago, he was clear on the benefits that AI could bring to the legal industry, stating: “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.”
Whether Leibniz was actually anticipating recent innovations like predictive coding or conversational interfaces in ‘legtech’ is up for debate. However, it is undeniable that in 2019, AI is transforming the legal industry to the extent that lawyers can now work in ways which were previously impossible.
In most industries we’re seeing AI have an impact on the way we do business, from chatbots helping major retailers handle customer queries to the ongoing development of predictive analytics in healthcare. Law is no different.
The future is now
A recent study of London law firms by CBRE revealed that almost half (48%) are already using AI. I don’t foresee this number doing anything but increasing over the next few years. Conversational interfaces can give consumers basic legal help (the app ‘DoNotPay’ tackles parking fines, for example). Automated document review turns hundreds of pages of ‘legalese’ into plain English. And tools like our own ‘Lexible’ use AI to analyse lengthy and often convoluted contracts to empower lawyers to cut through to key questions and decide what steps are the most important to take.
Humans make errors, and even highly trained lawyers can’t be infallible when reviewing 100 pages or more of elaborately worded agreements, especially with the lack of standardisation across contracts. AI-powered technology, however, can work 24/7 and, once trained with human expertise, makes fewer mistakes than its human counterpart, as well as not taking time off. This means that lawyers are able to focus on higher-value activities, providing more ‘bang for the buck’ to their clients and making the act of work more interesting for the lawyers.
Why is this important? It’s not just about saving time and labour for an individual lawyer, but also giving them incredibly powerful tools to increase their efficiency and value to clients and employers. In my opinion, lawyers should be actively seeking out AI-powered tools to add to their capabilities, meaning that they will be able to both focus on work that is more complex (freed from the repetitive everyday tasks machines simply do better), and simultaneously be better-equipped to tackle this work.
Also read
Artificial Intelligence Is on the Case in the Legal Profession
Artificial intelligence (AI) is, in fact, becoming a mainstay component of the legal profession. In some circumstances, this analytics-crunching technology is using algorithms and machine learning to do work that was previously done by entry-level lawyers. (What does that say about entry-level lawyers?)
Apparently, AI robot lawyers are here—and they’re not going away.
Still, Elon Musk has warned that AI is a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons, but before we start worrying about how the robot lawyer uprising won’t be televised (it will happen slowly and quietly in the middle of night), we connected with Lane Lillquist, the co-founder and CTO of legal tech company InCloudCounsel, to give us his thoughts on what we need to fear and/or not fear when it comes to lawyer robots.
Artificial Intelligence Is on the Case in the Legal Profession
