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AI for Lawyers A
rtificial intelligence is widely thought to be something related to robots which are set to replace humans in the future. However, they are already part of a lawyer’s day to day life. Artificial Intelligence or more commonly known as “AI” are tools which help us deal with today's times. They are the digital assistant ‘Siris’ or ‘Bixby’ in your smart phones and also produce the ‘recommendations’ in your Amazon shopping and entertainment accounts. Artificial intelligence is defined as “the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings”. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalise, or learn from past experience.i In their report of session 2017-19, the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence stated that AI is a tool which is already deeply embedded in our lives. The prejudices of the past must not be unwittingly built into automated systems, and such systems must be carefully designed from the beginning. Access to large quantities of data is one of the factors fueling the current AI boom. We have heard considerable evidence that the ways in which data is gathered and accessed must change, so that innovative companies and academia, have fair and reasonable access to data, while citizens and consumers can protect their privacy and personal agency.ii
8 The BILL of Middlesex
In the past, legal practice has been largely shielded by the incursion of automation and artificial intelligence even though the ways legal professionals process and disseminate data has evolved with advent of new technologies, the fundamentals remain the same. The practice of law is not immune from new technological advances and the impact of data driven analysis. It is being assaulted by the onslaught of sector specific AI applications with increased processing power and more effective algorithms. AI also known as augmented intelligence or cognitive computing is capable of being used to perform day to day functions more cheaply, faster and effectively. AI is now being used in the following ways by legal professionals: Practice Management and Billing: Legal Practice management software is a form of AI which helps lawyers to automatically compute their billable hours. These programmes record time on each matter and automatically produce invoices at the end of the set time period. Prediction Technology: Possibly the most advanced of the currently used AI which uses software to search documents, decide on their relevancy and rank them. A basic training is provided as the criteria is entered and the algorithm works its way through. AI then generates results that predict the outcome of litigation as they are mainly used in pre-litigation planning. The AI driven software analyses previous cases, judgements and similar. It analyses data relating to costs awarded, settled cases, appeals outcomes and judgements.
