Hi, I’m ROSS Your New Paralegal, May I Be Your Watson?
Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or present are certain to the miss the future.
— John F. Kennedy
Disrupting the market
The first wave disruption of the publishing market came with the introduction of mobile devices. Content should be available everywhere at any time. Moreover it should be easily findable, searchable and open source. To this end publishers developed all kinds of mobile compatible tools to enable lawyers to find what they needed. It started out with simple RSS feeds updating them on legal news on subjects they selected. Then it moved on to more advanced methods of news gathering like personalization and automatically scrolling the internet delivering to their customers in real time. Publisher adjusted their business models to more freemium type of content delivery. But open sourcing all content was a step too far. Until now.
The second wave of disruption of our market is at our doorstep: the robot revolution.
Actually it is not just at our doorstep, it already has its foot in the door.
One of the new LegalTech startups in this area originates from the University of Toronto.It’s called Ross Intelligence Inc. It started out as a student project to be “launched at the University of Toronto last year to compete in a contest that saw IBM offer its Watson platform to teams at 10 universities for the development of commercial applications”.
So who or what is ROSS?
ROSS is an artificially intelligent robot which uses IBM’s Watson technology to scour through billions of legal texts and citations on the internet within a second. “Ross improves upon existing alternatives by actually understanding your questions in natural language like- Can a bankrupt company still conduct business? Ross then provides you with an instant answer with citations and suggests highly topical readings from a variety of content sources.”
Source: Robots will replace Lawyers and Doctors in the Future
The interesting point which can be deducted from the above sentence are: ROSS understands legal questions, gives instant answers and is able to learn. From content sources that is.
Paralegals for instance have had at least 4 years of university education, possibly a few years of training in a law firm in order to understand legal questions from lawyers. It usually takes them a lot of hours to find the correct answer with precedent cases and citations. Moreover the answer may be incomplete or even wrong. Only if they find out by getting feedback from the lawyer paralegals can learn from their mistakes.
So not ROSS. ROSS learns instantly.
Denton one of Canada’s largest law firms immediately saw the future possibilities of ROSS and invested in the startup. The idea is to grow ROSS into a robot which can used of the shelf.
But ROSS needs content sources to be able to give lawyers answers and learn. That’s where the legal publishers come in. Legal publishers, especially the older ones sit on a lot of content. They provide this content to law firms by means of subscription models. These subscription models are never open source.
Why not? Legal publisher need to earn their money from something. Currently that is from subscriptions to content. This is however very much old fashioned and whether or not legal publishers like it, subscriptions will become less and less the standard.
Especially when the robot revolution really takes off.
Are there any competitors to ROSS?
Of course, just as on the real labor market, there are competitors. I could easily have replaced Ross by Peter or by LR. They are however in different niches of the market.
Peter for instance, draws up, signs, timestamps and stores contracts. You can also ask him for the list of EIN (list of contracts you signed).
Legal Robot does other things. Its software builds a legal language model from thousands of contracts. Then LR comes to life in the form of a legal assistant which integrates with enterprise systems. The LR :”gives you an instant error check for contracts and helps you write better documents”.
Note that ROSS is focused on providing answers to questions lawyers ask whereas Peter and LR focus more on drawing up contracts right.
These are definitely upcoming and here to stay: “Apparently AI is the new Black. Hire Peter earns an astonishing 755 votes on ProductHunt. Source: Raymond Blijd’s legal Complex
So what should legal publishers do?
Team up with startups like ROSS, Peter or Legal Robot. Provide their content to them for free but gain new readers and thus new revenue in return.
