How Artificial Intelligence will shake up the Legal Industry
The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting and augmenting the legal services industry.
With Travers Smith becoming one of the latest firms to embrace the technology, following in the footsteps of Magic Circle Firm Linklaters and global giant Denton’s, we are left with questions.
Why are firms ‘rushing’ to implement AI? What is its appeal? What does this mean for the Legal Profession?
Advantages of AI and Technological Advancement
The legal industry is ripe for digitisation, as a result of the low-level legal work requiring low decision making input and lots of information processing, for example, due diligence or research. Due to this, systems have arisen that can essentially replace individuals and perform the tasks more accurately, requiring less time and for a lower service cost.
As Professor Richard Susskind identifies, the greatest pressure on the current supply of legal services is cost,[1] specifically from a client point of view, in that, lawyers, or rather, legal advice, is becoming too expensive to obtain. Susskind estimates in ‘Tomorrow’s Lawyer’ that, ‘clients within the next three to five years will want to make a 30–50% cut in expenditure on Legal Costs, including internal legal advice.’[2] Since 2008, organisations and businesses of all types are pushing to reduce their expenditure on external services, including legal advice, in order to increase the efficiency of their operations. As a result of this pressure, law firms will have to adapt in order to retain existing clients and compete with firms that are attempting to undercut them.
This is where AI and other technologies, including Big Data Analytics, come in. These systems reduce costs by conducting low-level tasks, freeing up a lawyer’s time to focus on other work that requires a higher degree of decision making, such as meeting with clients. These cost savings are passed onto the client as they are billed less for the time spent on the case. As a result, the new systems are more in-tune with a post-recession world where clients are under pressure to reduce any and all unnecessary expenditure, including hefty legal costs. To add, the systems further increase productivity, by conducting research tasks to a greater extent than a human could, enabling lawyers to achieve a new level of preparedness. Rather than lawyers having to trawl for hours through recent decisions to keep abreast of new arguments that have been made, an AI can deliver the most relevant cases and information in a much shorter time span. This means that AI systems and technological developments can help level the playing field, as they enable smaller teams to compete with larger, less flexible, rivals by fulfilling the role of research leads on such teams.
Spotlight
One such AI is ROSS Intelligence. The system is an advanced research tool that sifts through all connected databases and large volumes of unstructured, text based data to collect and source key information.[3] The system is designed to cut down on the many, unbillable hours of information retrieval and research that lawyers conduct. The AI’s unique ability to understand plain language questions from users (questions you would normally ask a lawyer) removes the need for specificity and technical knowledge of Boolean searches or the requirement of keywords.
Comparably, contemporary solutions to legal research rely on keyword searches, which not only require an existing awareness of the issue, but the results then require the users to manually trawl through them to find the best result. Furthermore, ROSS does not require technical training, unlike rival legal research platforms, particularly those that use Boolean searches.[4] Moreover, the AI features a machine learning capability, enabling it to become more accurate in the future through its feedback facility, allowing users to provide positive and negative feedback on results, such as relevance. From this, the system can develop a more accurate set of results on future searches.
With similar AIs being adopted by the legal industry, and the focus on reducing client costs, lawyers are undergoing a structural change to the way they provide and deliver legal advice and new solutions are being found to older issues.
Access to Justice
Combined with cost reductions, some have argued that the advent of AI in the legal arena has challenged the Access to Justice crisis. This crisis is a result of the limitation through access and cost, for the vast majority of individuals and small businesses to secure legal representation.[5] As a consequence, there are ramifications for the Rule of Law, since not all individuals are receiving adequate legal advice.
An example of how AI is combating this crisis can be found with the online application, DoNotPay.[6] The AI has successfully challenged over 150,000 parking tickets and fines in New York and London, by asking users questions and then using the input from the answers to produce a document that can be used to challenge the fine, for free. Whilst similar AI is currently limited to specific fields, it is allowing individuals to have access to a degree of legal assistance they would not ordinarily have.
With systems such as ROSS intelligence gradually becoming available and more prominent in mass information work, what does this mean for legal work?
Effect on Legal Work
Typically, Trainees and fresh lawyers conduct the low-level legal work that is being taken up by AI systems, the work, as aforementioned, that requires a low level of decision making but requires a volume of data processing. Moreover, an increase in the interconnection between AI and other automated services, increases the pressure further. Automated document assembly, for example Exari,[7] can outperform junior lawyers by analysing more documents, quickly and will never tire, enabling documents to be constructed in an effortless manner by reacting to user input. Thus, it would seem that low-level work could be cannibalised by these systems. Would this result in lower numbers of paralegals and trainees?
Yet, to proceed all the way to conclude this is the end of lawyers is mistaken. These systems, no matter their sophistication, still need a human to interface with the research conducted, for example. Currently, the objective of AI systems is not to replace human lawyers, but to augment their work processes. Whilst, for example ROSS Intelligence, will significantly reduce the amount of time sent on research, a lawyer is still required to analyse the information and form arguments and advice for bespoke situations based upon that information. Furthermore, Lex Machina,[8] a tool that analyses public records of cases to help lawyers understand how a certain judge might rule in a particular case, requires a lawyer to put that information to good use. From this, whilst the systems can cut down on unbilled time by replacing routine tasks, lawyers are required to build upon that augmented process.
Further, lawyers will still be required for the client interaction side of legal work. For example, lawyers are still needed for interpretation of legal work, laws and client issues as well as diagnosing issues, but the mechanical, low decision, high volume informational work can be eased and augmented by AI systems. As we have seen with DoNotPay, the questions a lawyer can ask can be mimicked and planned out, however, reacting to the client’s situation in real time and spotting issues will require a greater sophistication of programming currently out of reach of the AI.
This all therefore, feeds into a new formulation and structure of a legal industry and demands a lawyer be technologically adept to succeed, this disruption, therefore, has the potential to fundamentally alter the way lawyers conduct business and provide advice. In the future, we will see a greater alignment of tech savvy graduates and the advent of AI. Withal, as has been reiterated throughout, the cost reduction benefit of using these systems could contribute to better and more competitive pricing of advice, not merely at the international and corporate levels, but also at the lower and more individual facing fronts, such as employment, land or even criminal law. On this point, as aforementioned, the systems could increase Access to Justice as well as to open up a new market as advice can be purchased by a large cohort of individuals that could not previously due to the lower pricing. Thus, one could argue that AI, rather than reducing work for lawyers, will in fact create more.
Simply put, the systems available today, whilst advanced, are currently limited to certain legal fields and to routine tasks. Contemporary bespoke legal advice, the bread and butter of a lawyer’s career, is still safe from machines for the time being. The systems presented augment a lawyer’s current work process, speeding up the case work and reducing the bills to the client. For firms, an AI will effectively increase output by reducing a lawyer’s time on routine tasks. Thus, more time can be spent working on client relationships and bespoke legal challenges. Since law firms rely on clients to generate revenue, anything that can provide a competitive advantage and create value for clients will protect long-term profits. As argued, this could open up a new market of people who previously could not afford legal advice, thus supplying further work to lawyers down the line.
Thus, rather than the commonplace belief that AI will marginalise lawyers, it will in fact force structural change to occur and facilitate greater access to clients and improve the quality of the service provided.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Professions-Technology-Transform-Experts/dp/0198713398
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tomorrows-Lawyers-Introduction-Your-Future/dp/019966806X
[3] http://www.rossintelligence.com/
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36303705
[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2016/09/06/artificial-intelligence-and-legal-delivery/#48edb05f2647
[6] http://www.donotpay.co.uk/signup.php
Title Graphic taken from Sina.cn Technology
