BY ANOOP BOSE.
Information Technology has wormed its way into every conceivable sphere of human existence, and the law is no exception. The legal profession, historically of traditional course, is increasingly being influenced by new technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potentiality to affect the manner in which the legal work would function in the foreseeable future. Very much like e-mail changed the way we do business, AI could become omnipresent—an indispensable tool for lawyers, and cost-effective legal services to an expanding client base.
The charismatic American President John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy once observed, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” The legal sector was one of the first to adopt AI with some leading law firms using AI platforms in some form since the year 2005. But the recent alarming headlines and predictions of AI replacing lawyers have created a creepy feeling of discomfort in the minds of many lawyers, invariably anxious about the future of their profession: “You Should Stop Practicing Law Now and Find Another Profession”; “Why Lawyers Will Become Obsolete”; “Rise of the Robolawyer”; “Here Come the Robot Lawyers”; “Why Hire a Lawyer?”; “Armies of Expertise Lawyers Replaced by Cheaper Software!” And so on.
Despite these clamorous headlines, AI is unlikely to throw lawyers overboard. Huzefa Tavawalla, who heads International Commercial Law Practice at Nishith Desai Associates, New Delhi, allays the fears that legal jobs are at stake. He says that one of the biggest challenges of AI is that a machine lacks a conscience.
As with many new technologies, there is a cycle of hype at the outset that creates magnified expectations, even though the long-term implications of that technology may be profound. The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence and judgement, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”.
AI is enabling judicial decision making in a number of ways. For example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the celebrated case of State v. Loomis, 881 N.W.2d 749 (Wis. 2016), upheld the use of algorithms in criminal sentencing decisions. While such algorithms represent an early use of primitive AI, they open the door for the employment of more sophisticated AI systems in the sentencing process in the future.
AI in law is undergoing an evolution rather than a revolution. But make no mistake—AI is already virtually in every business and activity that lawyers deal with, some more quickly and dramatically than others, and the legal profession will not be spared from this disruptive change. The incorporation of AI into a law firm’s systems and operations is a gradual, but steadily accelerating process.
Machine learning constitutes the capability of computers to teach themselves and learn from experience. This means that AI can do more than blindly adhere to what it has been programmed to do; it can learn from experience and continue to improve its enormous positive capabilities. Dave Waters, one of the foremost international authorities on AI, observed that “A baby learns to crawl, walk and then run. We are in the crawling stage when it comes to applying machine learning.”
Google’s cutting-edge machine-learning research spearheaded by DeepMind has been able to defeat the world’s best human Go players. Secondly, natural language processing constitutes the automatic manipulation of natural language, like speech and text, by software and its applications and integration to perform human-like analysis.
AI is rapidly being applied in all major sectors of the economy and society, including medicine, finance, transportation, manufacturing, media, entertainment and social relationships. Many of these applications would create new legal issues for lawyers, such as the legality of lethal autonomous weapons, liability of autonomous cars, financial bots that may run counter to antitrust laws, and the invulnerability of medical robots.
E-discovery, legal research and document review are getting more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. A recent survey of managing partners of American law firms found that over 36 percent of law firms and over 90 percent of large law firms are either currently using or actively exploiting the use of AI systems in their legal practices.
Professor Gary E. Marchant, a Regents’ Professor, Lincoln Professor of Emerging Technologies, Law & Ethics, developed the Technology Assessment Review (TAR), the first major application of AI in legal practice, using technology solutions to organize, analyse, and review very large and diverse data sets for e-discovery or record-intensive investigations. Going far beyond keyword and Boolean searches, TAR provided a fifty-fold increase in efficiency in document review than human review.
Ravel Law, also recently purchased by LexisNexis, uses legal analytics of judicial opinions to predict trends and outcomes in intellectual property litigation, and is now expanding to other types of complex litigation. Wolters Kluwer leverages a massive database of law firm billing records to provide baselines, comparative analysis, and efficiency improvements for in-house counsel and outside law firms.
Many law firms are developing models to help the firm to enhance its delivery model and provide diverse legal services more efficiently, swiftly and accurately to its clients. In that context, the firm signed an agreement with a leading Canada-based machine learning software provider called “Kira Systems”. These initial applications of AI to the legal profession are only the early beginnings of what would ultimately turn out to be a radical technological disruption to the practice of law.
According to Joanna Goodman, in her well-known treatise on “Making AI in Law: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Legal Services”, AI represents both the biggest opportunity and potentially the greatest threat to the legal profession since its formation. The transformative impacts of AI on legal practice would continue to accelerate a forward-movement.
Online dispute resolution tools are being developed to completely circumvent the judicial process. For example, the Modria online dispute resolution tool, developed from the eBay dispute resolution system, has been billed as the best civil on-line settlement system, resolving many thousands of disputes online using an AI system. The British Government is developing an Internet-based dispute-resolution system that would be used to resolve minor civil legal claims without any court involvement.
The U.S. Legal Services Corporation and law firms have joined hands to provide machine-learning legal portals to provide free legal advice on civil law matters to people who cannot afford to hire lawyers. In India, a leading full-service law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas became the first law firm in India to adopt AI technology manually.
One thing is certain—there would be winners and losers among lawyers who do or do not absorb AI, respectively. As one senior lawyer, David Halliwell, attached to the English law firm Pinsent Masons, recently remarked, “Unless private practice lawyers start to engage with new technology, they are not going to be relevant even to their clients.” The AI train is leaving the station—it is high time to jump aboard.
By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.