Machine Vision: Have No Fear, the Robots Are Coming
By Seth Saler
On Halloween, Casetext CEO Jake Heller told a webinar audience of law students that artificial intelligence will be more treat than trick in the legal space. Artificial intelligence is not what many think it is. Rather than working to replace attorneys and lawyers, it is trying to make human lives easier. From IBM’s Deep Blue to Google’s AlphaGo, we have witnessed the encroachment of artificial intelligence toward its end goal. The science and computer programming sectors endeavor to prove that “intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” But lawyers have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence being made to simulate human capabilities.
Ours is an industry of the mind rather than the body. Legal artificial intelligence concerns itself with contract review, document review, legal research, analytics and compliance. It is not so easily replicated as the assembly line in an early 20th century Ford assembly plant. Humans will always be necessary in the legal industry, but using machines to do more menial tasks frees up humans to do higher-order work.
Within artificial intelligence, there are subfields wherein AI makes tasks simpler and can, in limited capacities, automate certain tasks. Google notoriously engineered a program which managed to defeat experts at the centuries-old game in a relatively short timeframe. Natural language processing, expert systems and image recognition/machine vision are derivatives of a similar concept. By feeding machines information, we can train systems to identify certain patterns and make anticipatory decisions based on those patterns. In document review, artificial intelligence can single out types of clauses for further human review. In the world of Casetext and CARA, artificial intelligence can contextualize contents of a brief to generate suggestions for analysis.
As artificial intelligence emerges as a tool within the legal industry, it is likely to become the new “standard of care.” As an attorney in 2017, it would be unreasonable to rely on printed editions of codes, statutes, regulations, and cases. It is no longer acceptable to rely on books, but they were the method of gaining legal insights only a generation or two ago. Now you can expect to face consequences for failure to use online resources and failing to meet certain threshold levels of competence for clients.
As a law student, I am particularly concerned about my future place in the industry. I am acutely aware of shifts in technologies and how they can have drastic effects on competency, efficiency and placement. Because of that, I would love to see law schools embrace new technologies and even bring them into the classroom. Law schools owe it to their students — and students owe it to themselves — to become proficient in new technologies. Maybe more than anything else, today’s law schools and law students should be learning to use these advancements to bring value to future clients and to broaden access to justice.
