Month: November 2018

The Future of Law – Part 4: Our Robot Colleagues

Call it the rise of the robots.  The legal profession continues to be transformed by the use of artificial intelligence in new and innovative ways. New developments in the past five years alone stagger the mind as what would have sounded like science fiction not along ago continues to become reality, making the lives of lawyers easier but also forcing them to change how they do business if they want to survive and succeed.

Rewind to 2013, and you find Jay Leib and Dan Roth—who launched Discovery Cracker way back in 2000 to streamline discovery and make it electronic and searchable—birthing their then-new creation, NexLP.  For the past five years this company has used AI to analyze previously unstructured data and identify trends, using predictive coding to gauge, for example, the likely results of pending litigation based on past results.

Another entrepreneurial duo, Adam Nguyen and Ned Gannon, set into motion the Diligence Accelerator program from eBrevia to help lawyers handle the pressure from in-house counsel and other clients to cut costs. This AI-fueled software similarly extracts information from data as clients upload documents, search for information and download per their preferences. The program doesn’t just recognize words but notices common legal phrases and stores those in its “memory bank” for future use.

In 2015, Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, created an independent subsidiary called NextLaw Labs, which earned the firm distinction from The Financial Times as the most forward-thinking law firm of the year. The subsidiary’s advisory group picks through potentially disruptive ideas to find those most likely to succeed, among which has been Ross Intelligence, which uses IBM’s Watson cognitive computing to make reams of legal research instantly searchable via a request in plain English.

Another innovative law firm, Riverview Law in the United Kingdom, launched a virtual assistant called “Kim,” an acronym for knowledge, intelligence and meaning, which will use AI technology developed by the University of Liverpool and a U.S.-based data collection and management program called Clixlex, since renamed Kim Technologies.

And the U.K.-based Ravn Systems has used cognitive computing to build its Applied Cognitive Engine program, which also extracts information from data at high speed, pushing out the boundaries of what lawyers and law firms can accomplish in a short stretch of time. The company’s Contract Robot can do so with title deeds and other types of documents.

AI continues to blossom, and while many firms do not yet use it, the robots are clearly on the march. “You start with a number of documents and ask questions like what are the termination clauses,” Peter Wallqvist, CEO and co-founder of Ravn Systems, explained to the ABA Journal. “For example, there’s a telecommunications company that would tell us about documents they had to review. They told us how they had to go through 1,000 documents, which would take three people six months to complete. We can do that in a matter of days.”

As the Journal concluded, “That is the future. Maybe it’s not so scary after all.”

 

Future of the Law – Part 3: Meet LISA, the future of Law.

The term “Legal Intelligence Support Assistant” might sound like a fancy-pants way of referring to your paralegal, law library or perhaps secretary. When you shrink that term to the acronym LISA, you might be tempted to ask about LISA’s professional background or whether she’s a nice woman.

But this LISA is no woman, let alone a human.  “She” is an artificial intelligence solution who provides “expertise” in the automation of legal documents, reducing or replacing the need for human lawyers in representing either party to an agreement.    The National Law Journal sounded impressed with LISA, placing the technological innovation on its inaugural list of Legal AI Leaders, which highlighted 49 entrepreneurs and companies who the magazine believes represented the best available online AI tools and services.

Launched in April 2017, Robot Lawyer LISA has been used by students, academics, businesses of all varieties and sizes, general counsel and other legal users. The U.K.-based company and co-founder/CEO Chrissie Lightfoot have become part of the conversation about the future of legal services provision, particularly in the area of quality online legal advice and documents.

“I’ve always been driven to innovate and push the boundaries to make improvements related to new products and/or services with the focus on the customer or client at the center of everything,” Lightfoot told the online publication Womanthology. “No doubt this passion has been fueled by my interest in the future as I constantly question, “What’s next?”, “What’s possible?”, and “How are we going to get there?”

Based on the premise that 90 percent of the public cannot afford legal services, LISA brings together human and machine intelligence to enable to lay parties to put together a legally binding contract, making quality legal insight, guidance, support and advice both faster, more transparent, more affordable and more accessible—24/7/365 and around the world.    The LISA system first offered a non-disclosure/confidentiality agreement, and the company subsequently released a group of three property-related artificial intelligence tools: a commercial lease, a residential lease, and a lodger agreement. These have come in handy for everyone from professional service firms, to business associations, to property-related businesses as the letting or renting of property online continues to grow, Lightfoot says.

The AI system asks users a number of questions supported by information, know-how and experience from human lawyers who helped to create LISA. Users read and respond, and those answers lead the parties to a middle ground as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, while helping them navigate the nuances involved both legally and commercially, she says.

For example, a landlord might initiate a lease document using the LISA tool, and then the tenant can change the initial draft to make the lease 18 months instead of three years—or anything else two laypeople traditionally would negotiate, albeit traditionally with the help of two human lawyers. Instead, they get support, knowledge and intelligence from the system.

Ultimately, Lightfoot does not think AI will mean robots take over every task an attorney might handle. “AI and robots will continue to replace human jobs whilst augmenting others,” she told Womanthology. “If you do nothing, then you ought to be worried. However, as these human roles and skill-sets will variably shift, it is up to each and every one of us to reinvent ourselves and apply the skills that the machines cannot do, yet.”

 

Future of the Practice – Part 2: How Can Lawyers Better Serve the Public?

To survive and thrive in the 21st century, and to continue serving the public adequately, attorneys can no longer muddle through with business as usual.

Wide swaths of the public are unable to get their legal needs met. Innovations in technology and other changes in society continue to shift how legal services can be accessed and delivered. Bias, complexity, discrimination and lack of resources undermine the public’s trust and confidence in the justice system.

These were the top concerns raised a couple years ago by the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services, which also made several recommendations on solving these conundrums that seem well worth considering. Doing so, the commission wrote, would bring about the “significant change … needed to serve the public’s legal needs in the 21st century.”

Although there have been sustained efforts to expand access, most of those in poverty and the majority of moderate-income people cannot afford representation, the commission found. This means the public fails to obtain effective assistance and litigants come to court unrepresented, which adversely impacts all parties involved. At the same time, many lawyers, especially younger ones, are unemployed or underemployed, hemmed in by the traditional practice business model and the profession’s resistance to change, the ABA noted.

Technological and other innovations to assist the public in meeting their legal needs include experimental projects on the part of courts, bar associations, law schools and some lawyers, in areas like artificial intelligence, alternative billing and unbundled legal services. Against this backdrop, new providers of legal services continue to proliferate and create different choices for consumers and lawyers, the commission pointed out.

Public trust and confidence is undermined by the facts that the profession fails to reflect the diversity of the public, conscious and unconscious bias stands in the way of fairness and justice, the system’s functioning remains opaque to the average person, the criminal justice system is overburdened by mass incarceration and inadequate resources, and inadequate funding of courts on behalf of federal and state governments, the commission wrote.

The ABA Commission put forth a series of a dozen recommendations to help solve these stubborn challenges. For lawyers and law firms, these include supporting the goal of providing some type of effective assistance for all “essential civil legal needs” regardless of a person’s ability to pay, keeping abreast of relevant technologies, partnering with those in other disciplines and the public to gain insights about innovations in service delivery, and working to advance diversity and inclusion through updated policies, standards and practices.

To reform the court system, the commission recommended considering regulatory innovations such as exploring how legal services are delivered by Internet-based platforms and through alternative business structures. Courts also should become more accessible physically and virtually, through streamlined processes, multilingual materials and alternative dispute resolution systems, the ABA recommended.

Elsewhere in the public sphere, the commission recommended reforming the criminal justice system by decriminalizing minor offenses and adequately funding public defender offices, among other changes; vastly expanding resources to support longstanding efforts to successfully address the public’s unmet needs through legal aid and pro bono efforts; and measuring the outcomes of any established or new models “to evaluate effectiveness in fulfilling regulatory objectives.”

As for the ABA itself, the commission recommended that it establish a Center for Innovation, create guidelines for state bar associations and others to develop and administer “legal checkups” for attorneys and law firms, and, along with other bar associations, to “make the examination of the future of legal services part of their ongoing strategic long-range planning.”

Which seems wise, because however thoughtful and well considered, one bar association report is not going to singlehandedly change legal services delivery in a way that solves the access and trust problem while assisting unemployed and underemployed attorneys. But a persistent, strategic effort just might stand a chance.