ICT insight with Institute of ICT Professionals: Application of Legal Technology (2)

… Critical evaluation of some use cases

As a continuation for last week’s publication, this part focuses on some use case applications of Artificial intelligence in the legal field. These are sample AI-powered solutions currently in use in some jurisdictions.

AI-powered solutions rely on the above technologies discussed into details. These solutions are very critical to the legal industry today. Micheal Mills, in his article, Artificial intelligence in law: The stage of play 2016, remarked that a search on ‘artificial intelligence in law’ produced 86,400 results from just the news section of Google’s vast index. Subsequently, from the web, 32.8 million results and from videos almost 261,000. Again, according to Wolters Kluwer’s 2020 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, 58% of legal departments expect AI to affect their organisation over the next three years, with 82% of corporate legal departments expecting a greater use of technology to improve productivity over the course of the next three years.

Indicatively, AI –powered solutions have permeated almost every part of the legal service delivery industry today, helping law firms to be more efficient, profitable, and providing quality service at great speed and accuracy. Some of these AI-powered solutions are Luminance, Lex Machina, Relativity, Contract pod AI, Clarilis, Premonition, Thomson Reuters, Clide and Co, App4Legal, Kira, Leverton, eBravia, COIN by JP Morgan, ThoughtRiver, LawGeex, Legal Robot, Lawdroid, and Ross Intelligence to name a few.

Law firms naturally have some constraints on resources in most cases. Resources here would suffice for availability of lawyers, the financial strength of the firm and time available per count of lawyers. It may also further include other logistical needs like available of office space for library et al. For a law firm therefore to promote efficiency in its organization without any resourcing needs requires the firm to make good use of its resources, especially lawyers and time. An efficient law firm promoting efficiency will be profitable. I will recommend AI-powered solutions that provide the following services, i.e., legal research, contract review and management, document review, predicting legal outcomes, and more.

AI-powered solutions for firms to promote efficiency with no resource issues will include Luminance AI which fundamentally provides for automated contract drafting, negotiation and review, end to end eDiscovery (from investigation to litigation) and the spectrum of contract review projects. These legal services are very time-consuming tasks which most times impact on service delivery. Luminance AI, using Natural language processing and machine learning as discussed previously, reads, and forms some conceptual understanding of the documents fed it in any language to augment tasks ranges from review of initial contracts to automatically flagging anomalies within the contract, and further bringing into the limelight areas of non-compliance needing to be remedied.

Furthermore, it can hierarchically assign workflows and perform some low-level task automation, thereby freeing up critical resources for strategy formulation, analysis, and advisory roles. The amalgamation of all these leads to efficiency and productivity. It is worthy to note that Luminance AI applies aside utilising Natural Language processing and pattern recognition, combines both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Using unsupervised learning, its e-discovery abilities aids litigators in identifying hidden and incontrovertible evidence amongst mountains of irrelevant materials. The more lawyers use this AI-Powered solution, the more its able to understand such patterns of lawyers, thus becoming more intelligent and become customized for each lawyer’s needs. Luminance has now seen and analysed over 100 million documents in over 80 languages across hugely diverse fields of law, from non-potential risks, anomalies or contentious issues are surfaced when using Luminance’s AI to draft and review documents. Thus, the attribute of this solution promotes efficiency.

Secondly, Ross Intelligence is another AI-powered solution suitable for such an organisation. Diligent legal research is very critical to a law firm’s efficient utilization of its resources. The valuable attribute that goes into thorough research can be very daunting for law firms. Similarly, Ross intelligence applies natural language processing to ask the relevant questions, receive information on related case laws and other tertiary resources. Most firms employing the use of Ross Intelligence have seen significant improvement in their efficiency ratings. Baker Hostetler is an example, having used the software to work on 27 terabytes of data, with a Forbes report describing ROSS’ function in the law firm’s operations: ROSS will be able to quickly respond to questions after searching through billions of documents. Using NLP and machine learning, it performs the following tasks, i.e., question-based search, finding similar language constructions, document analysing to ensure arguments are bulletproof, question-focused case overviews and case treatments to avoid bad laws.

ThoughtRiver AI is another solution that leads to efficiency in the law firms. Some use cases are in contract negotiations, contract review and contract self-service. Using Artificial intelligence, it produces some level of visualisations of potential risks through the scanning and interpretation of written contracts used in commercial risk assessments. This solution decentralizes contract review as well as negotiations, thereby aiding firms to do more with less, thus increasing efficiency. It also assists to reduce risk and increase compliance against the same legal policies. Lawyers are therefore able to do more in less time, through delegating transactional work to the business and actively reduce the need to engage with outside counsel. Also, it is estimated that about 50% savings is made on time for reviewing and approving contracts and because lawyers can now do more, as well as sales and procurement teams are enabled to review contracts themselves, a lot more business is executed at reduced cost.

Premonition AI is another AI-powered solution which focus of legal analytics and court room data insights. Using both supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as deep learning technologies, it deeply on real time court monitoring with a far-reaching coverage larger than lexiNexis, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters combined. It has advanced filtering capabilities of reading over 50,000 pages in under a second. In terms of assigning lawyers to specific cases, Premonition AI, aids in accessing the lawyers based on their litigation experience, case types, performance (with respect to their overall, case type, judge, and client) as well as duration on the same metrics. It therefore allows for efficient allocation of resources available to the firm. It also performs predictive analytics using machine learning and deep learning tools to comb through the millions of volumes of cases cutting across the hierarchy of the courts and judges, to arrive at near accurate predictions on new cases, provide counsel and decide strategy for case management. Decisions arrived at based on its algorithms are data driven and cuts across tons of millions of data records, beyond a lawyer’s own biases and anecdotal experiences. This leads to efficiency within the organisation.

The writer is a Member, Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana

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