LegalTech

Hype vs. Reality of Artificial Intelligence in Law

I’m a big fan of anything that cuts through the hype when it come to AI in law.

And Ron Friedmann has done a sterling job of it, summarising the sought-after views of Professors Katie Atkinson and Daniel Katz, who presented at Lexpo ‘17 in Amsterdam this week.

For example, if you’re a fan of expert systems based on rules, here’s some food for thought:

“Dan is bearish on rules-based systems (expert systems). History is not favourable for this approach. Some successes in other fields but not that many. These systems lack common sense. These systems are static but the world changes. Success requires constant updating. Until recently, rules based systems beat data-based systems. Now, however, data beats rules.”

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Are You a Legal Engineer?

If you're a lawyer working in-house or in private practice and having a constant nagging feeling that there must be a better way, then perhaps this is for you...

In this call to action, co-founder and chief legal engineer at Wavelength, Drew Winlaw explains his epiphany moment which led him away from practising as a lawyer towards troubleshooting and fixing processes for legal teams.

In his words:

"That transition started with basics like teaching someone how to extract data from a legal practice management system in the right format to reduce their downstream administrative effort. That was the tip of the iceberg, and after that a lot of my work started with the question “Why can’t we do that?”.

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The Evolution of the Contract Stack

Here's a neat summary of what's in store for the evolution of contracts.

It sees three major technical phases affecting contracts: (1) PDFs > (2) e-signature > (3) NLP/AI/DLT.

But I'd argue that the more efficient victory awaits by letting APIs / IoT jump ahead of AI to take position #3 – a problem that the folks at clause.io seem set on solving with its 'Contract Stack'.

In their words:

"We firmly believe that the contract must transition from a static, manually managed, entity that to one that is dynamic, self-managing, and seamlessly integrated into business processes. This will only occur by enabling contracts to interface with data, auto-reconcile with other systems, perform transactions, provide real-time feedback and analysis to users, and integrate with other enterprise data." No AI required.

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From Disrupted to Disruptor

Startups come and go (particularly the latter) and after covering some 500+ legal startups since 2014, it’s such a rush to watch a successful lawyer give up a six-figure salary, start from scratch and disrupt the status quo.

Here’s a snippet of Nehal Madhani’s journey from Kirkland & Ellis, to working nights and weekends, committing thousands of hours of code, research and customer interviews, to build one of the most sophisticated (US) IP docketing platforms in the industry.

“From solo lawyers and freelance paralegals to top-tier law firms and large in-house legal departments at companies like Fresh and Ebsco; all are clients who entrust millions of dollars of intellectual property to Alt Legal’s software.”

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AI for In-House Counsel. No Hype.

Here's a non-hyped, balanced summary of how in-house counsel can gain the benefits of AI, summarised from a webinar (slide deck included) delivered by Ron Friedmann for Buying Legal Council, the trade organisation for legal procurement.

End the end, he sees AI being an incremental change, no revolution.

However:

"I would love to be proved wrong about incremental uptake. I’m just looking at the evidence I see today. I encourage law departments and law firms to experiment with and evaluate AI to understand its potential and be ready to spring into action as needed. AI could well be like the advent of the Internet – not important until fairly suddenly, it is."

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e-Discovery's Shift to In-House

An excellent analysis of where e-discovery is heading (in-house it seems), authoritatively penned by Gregory Bufithis of The Project Counsel Group.

In it, Gregory draws a parallel with trends in mobile, setting out the coming ’S-curve reset’ from incremental tweaks to rapid innovation through artificial intelligence.

Interestingly, he now sees organisations viewing e-discovery as part of a broader information challenge – turning to in-house solutions and to vendors that are currently flying under the radar.

Citing the view of several corporations about one particular vendor:

“Look, we used to have [xxx] do this for us outside the offie. Yes one of the major e-discovery players. And they used [xxx]. But we started using Brainspace and it was incredible, the context/connection it provided. It clearly answers .. for us, anyway … that gnawing issue: when you have unstructured data, how do you actually go about analyzing it? Their concept searching is amazing. And we did it all in house.”

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LexisNexis Drafts Five Startups into its LegalTech Accelerator

Here's a quick wrap of the 5 startups LexisNexis just drafted into its new 12-week LegalTech accelerator in Silicon Valley.

The program will be led by Lex Machina CEO Josh Becker with support from the LexisNexis crew, including Jamie Buckley, Vice President of US Product Management who explained their aim:

"... to identify some of the best and brightest legal tech startups, contribute to their early success, and then watch as their innovative technologies and vision transform the business and practice of law.”

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Aussie RegTech Startups Form Industry Association

The who's who of Aussie RegTech gathered at Allens last week to launch the RegTech Association, founded by Red Marker CEO, Matt Symons and chaired by GRC Solutions CEO, Julian Fenwick (who also chairs an existing 224-member LinkedIn Group of the same name).

Joining them as foundation members are Arctic Intelligence, Verifier, Dynamic GRC, Dysrupt Labs, Meetig8, Simple KYC, Cynopsis Solutions, AML Accelerate, Complii and identitii.

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"Best legal related snippets I have read/watched in ages."

— Caroline Ferguson, Business Transformation Manager at Simpson Grierson.