Washington Lawyer - November 2018 - 26

"Going forward, there's going to be some potential for creating new
products as we perfect our ability to mine data to extract insights from
the tremendous body of work that law firms and law departments have
embedded in their document-management systems," Fernandez says.

FEAR VS. REALITY
If there is a Chicken Little quality to fears about early AI adoption, it mainly
is centered around the impact on law firm personnel. Already, firms are
grappling with the effects of automation on tasks traditionally performed
by young associates and support personnel.
In "Can Robots Be Lawyers? Computers, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law,"
a 2015 academic paper, Dana Remus, a professor at the University of North
Carolina School of Law, and Frank S. Levy, a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, concluded that if all the legal technology available
at the time were engaged, it would reduce lawyers' hours in the United
States by 13 percent.
Anecdotal results reinforce fears more vividly. Everyone has heard a story
about law firm personnel being replaced, or their hours reduced, due to a
combination of outsourcing and technology. It is a convincing fear, if only
because it has proven true in other industries that have incorporated
AI-propelled technology and automation.

Any time one introduces
a new element into that
structure, and something
potentially changes the
impact on that structure,
it's likely to be viewed
with some degree of
ambivalence.
MARK A. COHEN, Legal Mosaic

"Any time one introduces a new element into that structure, and something potentially changes the impact on that structure, it's likely to be
viewed with some degree of ambivalence," says Mark A. Cohen, a lawyer
and founder of Legal Mosaic, a consulting company that specializes in
delivering legal services. "Law firms historically have been profitable
based on labor intensity and having as many lawyers as possible doing
exhaustively as many tasks as possible on as high a billing rate as possible.
AI changes that."
While there are pressures to adopt AI in law firms, there are key considerations that have slowed many from fully engaging the technology: AI
remains expensive; many law firms don't have the skill sets internally to use
the applications; and diving into AI methodologies takes law firm personnel
away from direct legal services.
As AI and machine learning transform law firms, some expect the competitive advantage of the largest law firms to be weakened, giving next-tier
firms a chance to compete for business originally outside their purview.
Or legal clients could entirely bypass firms and go directly to legal tech
vendors for certain services.
Some expect lawyers in the future will find their roles redefined by technology. Rather than providing legal advice or defending clients, they might
be working together with technologists to design algorithms that could
even replace traditional decision-makers in offices, boardrooms, and
courtrooms.
Critics of the use of AI applications believe there might come a day when
AI platforms - those that emphasize machine learning - could be vulnerable to charges of illegally practicing law or applying applications in an
unfair and biased manner due to bad data. TAR has been challenged in
court, although judges have largely accepted its reliability. As U.S.
Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck from the Southern District of New York
found in Hyles v. New York City: "To be clear, the Court believes that for most
cases today, TAR is the best and most efficient search tool," noted Peck.
As always with technology, issues of privacy loom large. AI and machine
learning are powerful tools, but technologists believe AI applications
must be strengthened to prevent leakage of confidential data. This likely
becomes an even more critical concern as law firms use AI technologies

Washington Lawyer - November 2018

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