Application of Legal Technology: Critical evaluation of some use cases 2

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Application of Legal Technology: Critical evaluation of some use cases 2

As a continuation of last week’s publication, this part focuses on some use-case applications of artificial intelligence in the legal field. These are sample AI-powered solutions currently in use in some jurisdictions.

AI-powered solutions rely on the above technologies discussed. These solutions are very critical to the legal industry today. Micheal Mills, in his article, Artificial intelligence in law: The stage of play 2016, remarked that a search on ‘artificial intelligence in law’ produced 86,400 results from just the news section of Google’s vast index. Subsequently, 32.8 million results from the web and from videos, almost 261,000. Again, according to Wolters Kluwer’s 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, 58% of legal departments expect AI to affect their organization over the next three years, with 82% of corporate legal departments expecting a greater use of technology to improve productivity over the course of the next three years.

Indicatively, AI-powered solutions have permeated almost every part of the legal service delivery industry today, helping law firms to be more efficient, and providing quality service at great speed and accuracy. Some of these AI-powered solutions are Luminance, Lex Machina, Relativity, Contract pod AI, Clarilis, Premonition, Thomson Reuters, Clide and Co, App4Legal, Kira, Leverton, eBravia, COIN by JP Morgan, ThoughtRiver, LawGeex, Legal Robot, Lawdroid, and Ross Intelligence to name a few.

Law firms naturally have some constraints on resources in most cases. Resources here would suffice for the availability of lawyers, the financial strength of the firm, and the time available per count of lawyers. It may also further include other logistical needs like office space for the library et al. For a law firm, therefore, to promote efficiency in its organization with no resourcing needs requires the firm to make good use of its resources, especially lawyers and time. An efficient law firm promoting efficiency will be profitable. I will recommend AI-powered solutions that provide the following services, i.e., legal research, contract review and management, document review, predicting legal outcomes, and more.

AI-powered solutions for firms to promote efficiency with no resource issues will include Luminance AI, which provides for automated contract drafting, negotiation, and review, end-to-end eDiscovery (from investigation to litigation), and the spectrum of contract review projects. These legal services are very time-consuming tasks that most times impact service delivery. Luminance AI, using Natural language processing and machine learning as discussed previously reads, and forms some conceptual understanding of the documents fed to it in any language to augment tasks ranging from a review of initial contracts to automatically flagging anomalies within the contract, and further bringing into the limelight areas of non-compliance needing to be remedied.

It can hierarchically assign workflows and perform some low-level task automation, freeing up critical resources for strategy formulation, analysis, and advisory roles. The amalgamation of all these leads to efficiency and productivity. Luminance AI applies Natural Language Processing and pattern recognition, combining both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Using unsupervised learning, its e-discovery abilities aid litigators in identifying hidden and incontrovertible evidence amongst mountains of irrelevant materials. The more lawyers use this AI-Powered solution, the more they can understand such patterns of lawyers, thus becoming more intelligent and become customized for each lawyer’s needs. Luminance has now seen and analyzed over 100 million documents in over 80 languages across hugely diverse fields of law, from non-potential risks, anomalies, or contentious issues are surfaced when using Luminance’s AI to draft and review documents. Thus, the attribute of this solution promotes efficiency.

Second, Ross Intelligence is another AI-powered solution suitable for such an organization. Diligent legal research is very critical to a law firm’s efficient utilization of its resources. The valuable attribute that goes into thorough research can be very daunting for law firms. Similarly, Ross’ intelligence applies natural language processing to ask relevant questions and receive information on related case laws and other tertiary resources. Most firms using Ross Intelligence have seen significant improvement in their efficiency ratings. Baker Hostetler is an example, having used the software to work on 27 terabytes of data, with a Forbes report describing Ross’ function in the law firm’s operations: Ross will be able to quickly respond to questions after searching through billions of documents. Using NLP and machine learning, it performs the following tasks, i.e., question-based search, finding similar language constructions, document analysis to ensure arguments are bulletproof, question-focused case overviews, and case treatments to avoid bad laws.

ThoughtRiver AI is another solution that leads to efficiency in law firms. Some use cases are in contract negotiations, contract review, and contract self-service. Using Artificial intelligence produces some level of visualization of potential risks through the scanning and interpretation of written contracts used in commercial risk assessments. This solution decentralizes contract review and negotiations, aiding firms to do more with less, thus increasing efficiency. It also helps reduce risk and increases compliance against the same legal policies. Lawyers can therefore do more in less time, by delegating transactional work to the business and actively reducing the need to engage with outside counsel. Also, it is estimated that about 50% savings are made on time for reviewing and approving contracts and because lawyers can now do more, as well as sales and procurement teams are enabled to review contracts themselves, a lot more business is executed at a reduced cost.

Premonition AI is another AI-powered solution that focuses on legal analytics and courtroom data insights. Using both supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as deep learning technologies, it deeply on real-time court monitoring with a far-reaching coverage larger than lexiNexis, Bloomberg, and Thomson Reuters combined. It has advanced filtering capabilities of reading over 50,000 pages in under a second. To assign lawyers to specific cases, Premonition AI aids in accessing the lawyers based on their litigation experience, case types, performance (regarding their overall, case type, judge, and client) as well as duration on the same metrics. It, therefore, allows for the efficient allocation of resources available to the firm. It also performs predictive analytics using machine learning and deep learning tools to comb through the millions of volumes of cases cutting across the hierarchy of the courts and judges, to arrive at near accurate predictions on new cases, provide counsel and decide strategies for case management. Decisions arrived at based on its algorithms are data-driven and cut across tons of millions of data records, beyond a lawyer’s own biases and anecdotal experiences. This leads to efficiency within the organization.

Author: Ing. Bernard Lemawu, BSc Elect Eng,MBA,LLB,LLM Cand. | Member, Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana

For comments, contact author ghwritesblog@gmail.com

 

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