AI For Lawyers: Understanding And Preparing For The Future Of Law

Its software, Clerk, is said to be capable of reading and analyzing legal briefs. It also evaluates their pros and cons and then assigns a score for each brief based on arguments, drafting and context. COIN was developed after the bank noticed an annual average of 12,000 new wholesale contracts with blatant errors. Here’s a quick introduction on how eBrevia captures content and displays relevant information to users. Through the use of LEVERSON’s AI, information such as payable rent, maintenance costs and expiration dates were extracted from thousands of documents and then organized on a spreadsheet. The company claims that its system can complete the task up to 40 percent faster when using it for the first time, and up to 90 percent for those with more experience.

• Law firms are still in the early stages of finding the right balance between efficiency and attention to detail.
• Imagine a firm with thousands of reviewed contracts, and you need to keep a copy of their financial obligation, renewal, expiration dates, and more.
• The process of due diligence is usually tedious for humans and AI will also help improve the accuracy of the process, thanks to its robotic nature.
• While this may sound futuristic, large businesses like Salesforce, Home Depot and eBay are already using AI-powered contract review services in their day-to-day operations.
• Another area where AI is already used extensively in the practice of law is in conducting legal research.
• Imagine being armed with that information the next time you want to discuss billing rates with your law firms.

Although such technologies are still in their infancy, they yield encouraging results. Some companies are developing a tax-law-focused AI-based legal prediction engine. They claim that their AI tool can accurately forecast the outcomes of ongoing cases with a 90% accuracy rate.

Lawyer AI: Creating a better client-centered experience

It’s possible that AI companies might be able to offer products that better complement the strengths of human lawyers by actually focusing less on precise identification of provisions. They could shift resources from duplicating lawyers’ deep analyses to address other aspects of due diligence. Additionally, AI that could automatically connect an original agreement with amending agreements, or group together all agreements related to an MSA would be particularly useful in a due diligence platform. On the one hand, we might expect large law firms to drive initial adoption as they are most able to pay for robust AI-based tools and integrations.

The profession is inherently stressful and often steeped in conflict. Once this processing happens more smoothly, teams may not be so stressed about catching all those critical details, instead focusing on the higher-order tasks of advising, synthesizing information, and building more challenging cases. Discover the critical AI trends and applications that separate winners from losers in the future of business. I’ll conclude this article with some thoughts about what might be a bit of a “catch 22” for AI in law and the legal profession. Is a company taking on some of the manual knowledge work of intellectual property application with AI.

Machine learning vs. AI

Move away from paper documents, electronic document storage has similar challenges hard copy document storage. Electronic records take less physical space, but sorting and finding documents is still challenging. Fastcase—enable users to conduct and attach research directly to relevant case details. A final area in which machine intelligence is increasingly making inroads is in legal research. A related use case for AI is in litigation finance, a practice in which a third party funds a plaintiff’s litigation costs in return for a share of the upside if the plaintiff’s case is successful.

One such application is Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions . COMPAS and similar AI tools are used by criminal judges in many states to assess the recidivism risk of defendants or convicted persons in decisions on pre-trial detention, sentencing or early release. There is much debate about the fairness or accuracy of these systems. According to a ProPublica study, such assessment tools seemed biased against black prisoners, disproportionately flagging them as being significantly more likely to reoffend than white prisoners.

Automation of lower-level tasks

The final section of this article focuses on how to maximize the strengths of AI in a due diligence context. It can also help a legal practitioner predict the outcome of any case on hand. These predictions are usually based on historical data and may unearth new information and potential arguments to take on any kind of case.

The software helps to do the essential work so that lawyers can focus on creative analysis. It includes a list of contract clauses that must be rejected or accepted. 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. Since June 2017, JPMorgan has used an AI-powered COIN program to decipher commercial loan agreements. Work that used to take 360,000 lawyer hours is now completed in seconds.

Litigation analysis

“Instead of performing open text searches looking for personal injury precedents, a lawyer could use Loom’s system to see all personal injury decisions that were published in a given time span and then break them down by outcome. Rolled out the software in 11 offices in Asia, Europe and North America in August 2017. The financial impact of this tech innovation in the law firm, however, is still unknown as the company has yet to release its findings. Intellectual property – AI tools guide lawyers in analyzing large IP portfolios and drawing insights from the content.

As more law firms and corporate legal departments recognize the increased efficiency that AI provides, the technology will steadily transition from a cutting-edge innovation to the new technological standard in law. In response, ethical considerations will also evolve as the legal field adapts to a new environment where artificial intelligence is tightly AI in Law coupled with the practice of law. EBrevia claims to use natural language processing and machine learning to extract relevant textual data from legal contracts and other documents to guide lawyers in analysis, due diligence and lease abstraction. In order for AI to draft legal contracts, for example, it will need to be trained to be a competent lawyer.

Expedite the Due Diligence Process

Moreover, the tool can be set up as “self-service” for clients, i.e., the client can log onto the system, select the type of contract they need, enter in a few variables, and the system will produce a standard form agreement ready to go. Law firms can use AI-based chatbots to handle their customers’ questions and concerns. These AI-powered chatbots can provide people with preliminary legal advice and assistance in bringing them on board.