INTRODUCTION

The foremost question when we hear the term “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Law” is what is its applicability in the legal field. Perhaps it is better to use the term “Cognitive Computing” when talking about AI, but what is its applicability in the legal field? Let’s discuss. Like other professional sectors, the legal field has also seen massive innovation in terms of technological evolution and has witnessed the same in the operation of the legal professionals.

The legal professionals, such as lawyers and paralegals, have tried to keep pace with the technological advancements by acquiring proficiency in operation of word process, telecommunications, presenting data and the like. On a much larger scale, we saw technological development through adoption of algorithms and machine learning to execute the services carried out by lawyers.

In this article, I want to provide you with some  insights on how adoption of AI  in legal field will bring about a drastic change in the functioning of the legal field, its advantages in the space, and the various applications used by the lawyers to carry out whichever work is required to be done in the legal field.

With the involvement of AI in the legal field, a very good amount of work has become quite effortless for the lawyers. For instance, a lawyer’s most extensive work is that of legal research, where lawyers are required to dig through many books/case laws for finding answers to their queries. With the help of AI and online legal data resources like LexisNexis as well as Practical Law, such tools have lessened the tedious legal research activity. Lex Machina is one such tool which aids lawyers in forming a case approach on the basis of results such as processing litigation data, revealing insights which were never available about judges, lawyers, parties and subjects involved in a case, etc. Likewise, contract reviewing, contract analytics, litigation prediction, predictive coding, due diligence, document automation, intellectual property, electronic billing, are few other operations that are powered by AI for the benefit of legal professionals.

The article further gives insights on the applications which are being used by the legal teams in the said field.

DIFFERENT APPLICATION CURRENTLY BEING USED

1. KIRA SYSTEMS: This application was founded by Noah Waisberg, a former M&A lawyer for the work on Due Diligence. Due Diligence is a very extensive work and many associates get tired, cranky with the voluminous work involved in the said process. Kira Systems is a software that is capable of performing more accurate due diligence by contract reviewing, highlighting, and extracting relevant content for analysis. The company claims that the system is able to complete up to 40% to 90% of the work automatically.

2. LEVERTON: The application is a product of German Institute for AI. It uses Artificial Intelligence to extract relevant data, compile information, and manage documents. The tool is capable of reading contracts at high speeds in 20 different languages. Somewhere in 2015, an IT firm Atos approached Colliers International, a real estate firm which used Leverton and extracted information such as payable rent, maintenance costs, and expiration dates from 1000 such documents which could be organized on a spreadsheet.

3. eBREVIA: Co-founders Ned Gannon and Adam Nguyen built a start-up in partnership with Columbia University with the intention of lessening the burden of reviewing multiple contracts for a smooth reviewing process. The application claims to use a natural language machine to extract relevant textual data from contracts and other documents. The software summarizes the extracted documents into a report which can be shared and downloaded in different formats. The application can analyze more than 50 documents in less than a minute with 10% accuracy. Additionally, the company offers bespoke solutions by training its software to customize the requirements of firms. Baker McKenzie offered the software in 11 offices in Asia, Europe and North America.

4. JP MORGAN: The program name COIN (Contract Intelligence) extracts 150 attributes from 12,000 commercial credit agreements and contracts in a few minutes. This implies that a duration of 36,000 hours of manual legal work is accomplished in a few minutes.

5. THOUGHTRIVER: This software application handles contracts, investigations, and portfolio reviews. The engine was developed at Cambridge University with machine learning experts. The software was designed to automate summaries of high volume contract reviews. In short, the system is capable of flagging risky contracts automatically.

6. ROSS INTELLIGENCE: This tool was well equipped for legal research. This tool advanced a lawyer with its natural language search capabilities by asking questions and receiving information such as related case laws, articles, and other relevant secondary sources. “The Company shutdown earlier this year due to legal issues with competitors in the same sector”.

7. LAWGEEX: LawGeex is a software that validates contracts within predefined policies where on failure of the standards, editing, and approval of the suggested changes are carried out. The software involves mechanism of text analytics, statistical benchmarks, machine learning and legal knowledge. It aims at aiding lawyers with reducing 90% of workload.

8. LEGAL ROBOT: A San Francisco based AI company, offers contract analytics. The Company claims  that its software application is capable of changing legal content into numeric form and raise issues on the documents through machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. It builds a legal language model from 1000 documents which further facilitates legal phrasing and its enforceability. It also provides suggestions on improving the contract compliance, readability, its consistency, risk factors, and differences in jurisdiction.

9. CASE TEXT: CaseText’s CARA is one such software company which allows lawyers to forecast an opposing counsel’s arguments by finding opinions previously used by lawyers. It can also detect cases which are unreliable and flagged negatively.

10. EVERLAW: This tool uses its predictive coding feature to create prediction models based on at least 300 documents which are classified into relevant and irrelevant to the case in hand. Artificial Intelligence helps users to figure out the relevant documents.

11. DISCO: Disco is another search engine tool which claims to be the fastest cloud technology for searching on voluminous documents. This tool is similar to that of Everlaw as it also employs prediction technology for determining the relevancy of documents to the user.

12. EXTERRO: WhatSun is an application by Exterro which combines the functions of a project management software with the capabilities of performing e-Discovery, which implies that a researcher can collaborate their legal research by using the said software. Using the software can reduce 95% of the task time for  lawyers .

13. BRAINSPACE DISCOVERY: The software sorts documents to match a user’s document search. AI uses terms or phrase extension to find a similar document and provides a refined search.

14. CATALYST: Catalyst market is Denver bases and it is an automated redaction product which helps lawyers and legal analysts to remove sensitive and confidential information on documents. The tool allows an individual to convert a document to digital format and perform multiple sets of redactions for a document in hand for searching relevant words or phrases.

15. RAVEL LAW: Ravel Law is another such tool which aids in identifying outcomes based on relevant case laws, precedents, judge rulings from more than 400 courts. It includes citations, decisions of specific judges that helps lawyers in understanding the judge's ruling of a case.

16. PREMONITION: Premonition is the largest litigation database. It has invented the concept of predicting a lawyer's success by analysing his/her winning rate, type, case duration at an accuracy of 30.7% average case outcome. It helps in knowing how long a case will continue for each attorney.

17. TRADEMARK NOW: TrademarkNow is a company which specialises in the work of intellectual property application with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The algorithm used by the software turns out to be a very complex one and helps in shortening weeklong searches for patents, trademark, registered products using the Trademark Clearance platform which can provide search results within 15 seconds. This system therefore promises efficacy in its working for the legal teams.

18. SMARTSHELL: SmartShell released a software to support paralegals for reviewing documents, formatting, drafting and such related legal work for patent applications. The software uses natural language and AI to assist in creating legal claims.

19. SpeedLegal: SpeedLegal, a San Francisco based startup uses a SaaS platform to provide PropTech and LegalTech services. Software as a service (SaaS) is an application which delivers service over the Internet. Instead of installing or maintaining the application, the service can be accessed over the internet without usage of complex software and hardware management. The platform is trained via natural language processing  for reading and reviewing the documents. SpeedLegal specializes in analyzing real estate documents, generates a summary of complex legal documents, and highlights key risks. It also offers customizable solutions depending upon the category of documents. Using SpeedLegal, property managers, brokers, and home buyers/sellers can quickly execute property deals using its AI based tools.‍

‍CONCLUSION‍

There are many such software applications which have been introduced in the legal field with the usage of Artificial Intelligence, but not necessarily each and every lawyer will be quick in adopting such tools and some of them don’t find the technology worthwhile to employ in the working process.

However, there are many firms/legal teams who have willingly adopted AI based tools and are now reaping the benefits of being up to date with the changing LegalTech space. Without second thoughts, Artificial Intelligence has evolved to present great opportunities as well as help with the overcoming challenges faced by legal professionals. This has led to the revolutionization and rejuvenation of the law industry.

Obviously there are arguments on the other side where a few lawyers have shown reluctance to change and still prefer the human effort based approach to legal work. We hope things will soon change for the better and we will be able to free up lawyers’ time for doing the core legal work rather than repeat manual automatable tasks.

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Reference:

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/ai-and-its-impact-on-legal-technology

https://www.analyticssteps.com/blogs/artificial-intelligence-law-industry

https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/ai-in-law-legal-practice-current-applications/

https://algorithmxlab.com/blog/top-10-applications-artificial-intelligence-in-law/

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/artificial-intelligence-ai-report

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