Matt DenOuden, Onit
CCBJ: To start, please tell us about your background. Matt DenOuden: I’m a lawyer by training who transitioned to legal technology 21 years ago. For the last six years, I’ve led Onit’s sales and account management teams and been a member of co-founder and CEO Eric M. Elfman’s executive team. Artificial intelligence has long been a subject of sci-fi movies, but it is quickly establishing itself in real life. Can you tell us what AI is? In a nutshell, AI is technology doing something that a human mind would have otherwise done. My favorite definition of AI is the most practical one. Fundamentally, it’s a technology that does a task
Matt DenOuden Matt DenOuden has nearly 30 years of legal industry experience, including a dozen years practicing law as a partner in a boutique defense firm in Hartford, Connecticut. While there, he started and grew an early e-discovery technology practice. In 2002, he left private practice to join a young e-billing company, TyMetrix. As vice president of sales for TyMetrix for 14 years, he helped take the company from four clients and $2 million in revenue to 250 clients and $60 million in revenue.
or suggests decisions that a person would have otherwise done. And I emphasize that it’s often a part of a workflow instead of accomplishing the whole thing. It’s helpful to think about it in those simple terms. In the legal enterprise software world, AI has gained a foothold and is quickly growing. Why is it becoming so interesting for lawyers and legal operations? It’s because there is both top-down interest and pressure and bottom-up enthusiasm. We hear from companies that legal has AI as part of their overall technology strategy, whether its use relates to contract management, invoice review, or an overall digital transformation of the business at large. The bottom-up enthusiasm is there as well, driven in part by the belt-tightening that happened during the height of a pandemic and for the good fiscal performance reason of trying to find the most efficient ways to do things. There are very demonstrable ways to save time on work through AI. It has a tangible effect. For example, a study found that those who use AI to review contracts can be 52% more productive. If you compile that across everyone in corporate legal reviewing contracts, many people are suddenly finding a task much easier to complete. Results like that stoke enthusiasm from people who are doing the heavy lifting. 2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | 39
2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
AI Can Think and Move Through Work Like a Lawyer. But What Does That Mean for Lawyers?
