Washington Lawyer - November 2018 - 25

By connecting the dots between internal and external information, law firms
can tease out different threads and gain new insights. The possibilities are
endless, say observers, noting that it could result in a tremendous advancement
in the quality of advisory services teased out through AI or machine-learning
applications.
As lawyers shift from being users to masters of AI tools, there is an entirely
new avenue for them to explore - legal technology entrepreneurship. Two
pacesetters in that department are Dentons and Bryan Cave LLP.
Dentons introduced NextLaw Labs in 2015, and Bryan Cave inaugurated TechX
in 2017, both subsidiaries charged with incubating legal software and investing
in legal tech startups. For example, Dentons invested in Apperio, a United
Kingdom-based startup with an application that helps in-house legal teams
analyze their legal spend. Of course, not everyone needs to stand up a legal
tech incubator to master AI, but not participating in the AI movement could
affect a law firm's bottom line.

EVOLUTION OF AI
With any technology, there is a propaganda cycle that touts the technology's
futuristic implications, and then, inevitably, a gap emerges between the firm's
high expectations and the reality of everyday use. AI might have been an early
example of that, but many believe it has begun to meet its promise.
Yes, AI is advancing slowly in the legal community, as compared to its speedy
adoption in other industries such as health care, financial services, and transportation logistics, but it has already made inroads in law firms in the types of legal
tools that have been deployed in legal research and e-discovery.
"It's kind of interesting in the history of AI and the legal community that the
technology bubbles up to become a really important innovation about every
10 years, and then you go through AI winters where no one mentions it at all,"
says Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and national expert in law firm technology.
"There's definitely something different happening now. It's finding its way."
The first introduction of AI and machine learning into the law firm was in technology-assisted reviews (TARs), which have been used to complete e-discovery.
Evolving beyond next-stage Boolean searches, AI techniques applied legal
analytics to massive data sets to predict trends in complex litigation or to analyze
billing and staffing records. For example, AI has been used to manage contract
portfolios to identify contracts that might need review, updating, or renewal.
There have also been entrepreneurial-inspired AI platforms that assist lawyers
in specific practice areas such as real estate, litigation, and bankruptcy. They
process legal documents at a space-age speed. One of the early innovators
is ROSS, an online research and analysis tool. Dubbed the first robot lawyer, it
is powered in part by IBM's Watson supercomputer.
Online dispute resolution tools have been and are being improved to aid in
the legal decision-making process. Automated decision-making systems (ADM)
have been used to foretell and proscribe human behavior, and judges use them
to determine sentences.
An area primed for innovation in law firms is chatbots. Many tech-friendly
professionals believe that legal bots could be beneficial if used more broadly
to interact with and provide customized answers to clients. A notable example
is the legal aid chatbot DoNotPay, which helps users tackle issues in 1,000 areas
of the law for free.
In the future, deep-learning practices could allow computers in law firms to
generate abstracts and summaries that will save time yet provide unbiased,
actionable overviews of documents and their contents.
Another frontier for legal technology will be predictive analytics. By shifting
from descriptive analysis to predictive analytics, new AI-based tech tools could
forecast case outcomes, court decisions, or even a law firm's likely performance.

It's kind of interesting
in the history of AI
and the legal community
that the technology bubbles
up to become a really
important innovation
about every 10 years,
and then you go through
AI winters where no one
mentions it at all.
DENNIS KENNEDY,
The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Washington Lawyer - November 2018

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