Artificial intelligence (AI) is working its way into the legal services market at an increasing pace. As robots decide what paragraphs to include in legal contracts and traditional lawyers struggle to maintain the old order, what are the implications for the industry?
There has been litigation support software for years, but intelligent software has now moved on to smarter search and discovery, contracts, analysis and more. A recent, highly publicised example is Berwin Leighton Paisner’s (BLP) contract robot. This AI platform, based on RAVN software, creates legal documents. It reads, interprets and extracts specific information from documents and converts it into a structured output, in a fraction of the time it takes a human, and, perhaps more importantly, with a higher degree of accuracy. In another example, a lawyer from Freshfields in New York has already seen the impact on law firms. He said that in 2006 they had around 60 contract attorneys working on second request matters at any one time. By last year, that figure was just 12 because of predictive coding and electronic review protocols.
We are fast approaching a point where many legal documents will never see a human eye.
Read more in Sarah Burnett’s article at Professional Outsourcing Magazine
