AI and Law join hands to create innovative AI solutions and applications to automate mundane legal processes such as reviewing documents or identifying critical clauses.
When was the last time you asked Alexa to set you a reminder? Maybe you asked Siri to call someone from your contact list on the speaker? Perhaps you requested Google Assistant to play your relaxation playlist.
All of these are examples of consumer Artificial Intelligence-powered smart assistants. They help you complete the menial tasks of your life so you can focus on more important things.
But, did you ever think that AI can penetrate the boundaries of the manually laden legal industry? Can it help practitioners and lawyers with automation, reducing their time on monotonous tasks?
Artificial intelligence and the law are fields you wouldn’t think would fuse together in harmony. One of the reasons is their vastly different natures. However, in recent times more and more legal practitioners are using Artificial intelligence in their practice. It is helping them accomplish tasks at a much faster pace and simplify complicated things.
Current State of Artificial Intelligence in Law
While consumer AI is fairly developed by this point in time, AI in the legal industry is still in its infancy. Fully autonomous AI lawyers are a little way too far out. Current practitioners need not worry about AI overpowering their expertise.
Being assisted by Natural Language Processing, the current state of Artificial Intelligence in law is able to lend a helping hand to practitioners in simplifying the legalese, get through contracts quickly, find out any flaw or loophole in an agreement et al.
How Will Artificial Intelligence Change The Legal System
The arrival of AI in the field of law brings with it new and exciting avenues. Moreover, it motivates every legal practitioner to incorporate AI into their legal practice.
1. Review Automation and Assisted Legal Discovery
Document analysis is a major part of any legal discovery process and also is time-consuming.
AI solutions aim at improving these time-consuming processes making them more efficient by automating document review. Marking out the important documents or even the relevant parts of the documents ensures that no human effort or time goes to waste in discovering facts for any given legal case.
Smart Contract Risk Identification (SCRI) Software is an AI-driven legal document analyzer that helps lawyers with contract review automation.
It automatically classifies the complete document into clause-based categories. Moreover, it helps the lawyers to assess risks and quickly visualize the severity of the clause.
Frequent document reviews serve as good training material to the algorithms. With more documents passing through the AI assistants, algorithms get smarter in recognizing patterns and important facts.
Once a document is marked as relevant in the system, AI or ML algorithms can then sort through other documents too. They can identify similarities and provide a fact-based case background to help lawyers defend and present the case appropriately.
2. Simplification of Legalese
Lawyers go through years of rigorous education to reach a point where they are easily able to understand and decipher legalese. The clients who come in for consultations usually don’t understand the jargon and legal terms.
AI systems can help them understand the basics of any legal document by simplifying legalese for the clients before they meet in with a lawyer.
Many AI-enabled assistants allow commoners to upload their legal documents and get simplified versions of the documents in minutes. Based on the analysis, AI solutions are also recommending how a lawyer can help them without wasting unwarranted time in the legal discovery process.
The users upload the files and AI automatically generates a case file. The lawyers can then go through it. It ultimately results in saving time and money for legal practitioners and common people.
3. Expedite the Due Diligence Process
Uncovering background information through the due diligence process is another time-consuming process that legal practitioners spend their time on. An AI-assisted platform can help them expedite this process and save time.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence in law firms for the due diligence process will be massive as it will help them verify facts and present figures and resolutions from previous cases. The process of due diligence is usually tedious for humans and AI will also help improve the accuracy of the process, thanks to its robotic nature.
Our Head of Analytics, Ganes Kesari, in an interview with The Sociable stated that “Today, AI is more suited to play the role of a judicial assistant than that of a criminal judge. It is smart at processing details, summarizing cases and looking up references. It is not ready to take decisions on cases just as yet.”
4. Administration Automation
Accurately billing the productive invoiceable hours is a bit tricky. An AI-powered system can help you simplify the billing and logging portion of the job using various smart measurement tools and metrics.
AI can also take over the invoicing duties and send out billable invoices to customers automatically. Furthermore, it can follow up on late payments with the help of process automation algorithms.
5. Personal Legal Assistant
Every good lawyer needs an assistant to record the ongoing procedures as well as to pull up data from past records.
These duties can be outsourced to a legal digital assistant, which with the help of Natural Language Processing can gather insights and data. Think of it as Siri or Cortana with knowledge of the law.
6. AI Chatbot for Client Onboarding
As humans, we have a physical limitation to the number of people we can provide preliminary help and legal advice to. Imagine helping thousands of people without even talking to one.
Yes, with the use of AI Chatbots you can provide preliminary legal advice to a multitude of people and help them get on board as full time paying clients for your legal practice.
Chatbots can also help guide people on the right path and direct them to a specialist if their case needs one. Chatbots act as a buffer between you and the client and gather all of the necessary data before any human interaction is requested.
7. Predictive Analytics for Prediction of Legal Outcomes
AI can use literal truckloads of data and sort through it using various parameters like the previous ruling of the judge, similar case judgments, emotional triggers, etc.
It can also help a legal practitioner predict the outcome of any case on hand. These predictions are usually based on historical data and may unearth new information and potential arguments to take on any kind of case.
These predictions can help you answer some common questions clients pose such as “How likely are we to win?” or “Should I accept a settlement?” Equipped with the data and predictions with the help of Artificial Intelligence in law firms, you will be in a better position to answer these pressing questions.
8. Divorce Proceeding Automation
On average, a typical divorce settlement can cost about $15,000 and take up on average about a year to conclude. Anyone going through the process of separation doesn’t warrant this additional financial burden or time penalty to finish the legal proceedings.
AI-based solutions like Wevorce offer self-guided solutions for a fraction of the cost while saving a lot of time in the process. Legal experts are available just one click away if the proceeding requires human intervention.
These kinds of AI implementation will reduce the human effort required and facilitate faster proceedings saving valuable time on part of the judiciary system as well as legal practitioners.
9. Smart Automated Contracting
The impact of Artificial Intelligence in law firms which mainly deal with drafting, contracting or contract review will be immense with the onset of AI in law. Platforms like LawGeex automates the contracting process to allow your lawyers to focus on more important matters at hand.
In a study conducted recently, AI achieved nearly the same accuracy as the smartest test subject of the study. Surprisingly, it achieved this in mere seconds as opposed to the hours taken by the human.
This study may seem as if it will cause massive attrition in the industry in the near future. But what it actually proves is that AI will be a trusted companion to help us reduce the manual effort required in any legal proceeding. It will also free up precious time for the practitioners to take on more important things.
Future of Artificial Intelligence in Law
Law is a field of data and its interpretation to help achieve a balance in society. So, Artificial intelligence and data, combined, can have a much larger impact on law firms. Technologies such as predictive analysis will equip the future lawyers of the industry with leverageable data and easily understandable interpretation. Possibly, the time required to conclude a case will significantly reduce, thanks to all the advancements in the field of AI and law.
There are various things that AI can’t do. For example, meeting clients or appearing in a court of law for which human presence is necessary. However, with leverageable data in hand, the process will be a lot smoother and the time to conclude any proceeding will reduce.
AI and Law Can Together Change the Way Legal Industry Works
It is clear that man and machine will fuse together harmoniously with the arrival of fully autonomous AI in law. Law firms will have to modify their strategies to incorporate AI in their day to day functioning. In return, AI will act as an invisible helping hand allowing the firms to take on more complex cases.
We hope this article was able to shed some light on the relationship between AI and law. Comment below and tell us what you think of the marriage between AI and Law. Finally, if you like this article, share it on social media and check out our other articles on disruptive technologies.
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