THE MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: AI AND THE LAW

Like every other job on earth, the work of the legal profession is being affected internationally by artificial intelligence. This is already starting to have an impact on the education of lawyers as the world’s most innovative universities begin to include legal tech awareness in their undergraduate programmes for the lawyers of the future.

Lawyers and law students who try to deny the necessity of finding out more about legal tech are many in number and, sadly, are probably going to become less employable. Legal English will inevitably have to adapt as the technology that assists lawyers to do their jobs more efficiently develops and grows in importance. It is therefore no longer possible to learn legal English effectively without keeping a close watch on developments in legal tech. As this is a digital revolution, it seems fitting that online is the best place to do your research and all you need to do to catch up on this subject is to give it some time and effort. It is a very easily accessible subject. Let’s begin the conversation.

The article below by Erin Winick was published recently in the MIT Technology Review. It examines how Artificial Intelligence is being used in law in the U.S.A. The article is followed by discussion points.

(A) AI is augmenting and automating the tasks currently performed by hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. alone. Meticulous research, deep study of case law, and intricate argument- building-lawyers have used similar methods to ply their trade for hundreds of years. But they’d better watch out, because artificial intelligence is moving in on the field. As of 2016, there were over 1,300,000 licensed lawyers and 200,000 paralegals in the U.S. Consultancy group McKinsey estimates that 22 percent of a lawyer’s job and 35 percent of a law clerk’s job can be automated, which means that while humanity won’t be completely overtaken, major businesses and career adjustments aren’t far off. In some cases, they’re already here.

“If I was the parent of a law student, I would be concerned a bit,” says Todd Solomon, a partner at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, based in Chicago. “There are fewer opportunities for young lawyers to get trained, and that’s the case outside of AI already. But if you add AI onto that, there are ways that is advancement, and there are ways it is hurting us as well.”

So far, AI-powered document discovery tools have had the biggest impact on the field. By training on millions of existing documents, case files, and legal briefs, a machine-learning algorithm can learn to flag the appropriate sources a lawyer needs to craft a case, often more successfully than humans. For example, JP Morgan announced earlier this year that it is using software called Contract Intelligence, or COIN, which can in seconds perform document review tasks that took legal aides 360,000 hours.

People fresh out of law school won’t be spared the impact of automation either. Document- based grunt work is typically a key training ground for first-year associate lawyers, and AI-based products are already stepping in. CaseMine, a legal technology company based in India, builds on document discovery software with what it calls its “virtual associate,” CaseIQ. The system takes an uploaded brief and suggests changes to make it more authoritative, while providing additional documents that can strengthen a lawyer’s arguments. “I think it will help make [entry-level lawyers] better lawyers faster. Make them more prolific,” says CaseMine’s founder, Aniruddha Yadav. “If they are handling a couple cases at a time, they will learn the law faster.”

Law schools have recognized the trend and are beginning to adapt: many have created new programs to teach the next generation of lawyers how to use these platforms and speak intelligently to the people building them. Harvard, for example, offers courses in legal innovation and programming for lawyers. Arman Moeini, a recent law school graduate and now an associate attorney, had the chance to use electronic discovery software while at the University of Florida. “Although imperfect, this software is quite effective, and drastically cuts down on the time spent performing document review—a task generally given to entry-level associates at larger national firms,” Moeini says.

There are, however, still obstacles to further adoption of AI in the legal profession. Chief among them is a lack of accessible data to use in training the software. Take the contract analysis company Legal Robot. In order to train its program, a team of developers built their own database of terms and conditions by collecting examples from major websites. But that wasn’t enough—the company also had to strike deals with law firms to gain access to their private repositories. In total, they compiled over five million contracts.

Adam Ziegler, the managing director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, wants to remove this barrier to entry. He has helped lead the CaseLaw Access Project, an effort to digitize the entire historical record of U.S. court opinions and make that data available for legal algorithms to read and train on.

Although lawyers are not known for their fast uptake of technology, Ziegler anticipates interest. “I expect that clients’ knowing that technology can perform many of the repetitive tasks will [make them] increasingly unwilling for lawyers to do that work,” Ziegler says. “Why would you pay for a junior associate to do the work that technology could do faster?”

DISCUSSION POINTS • The article refers to lawyers doing “meticulous research” in carrying out their work.

The dictionary definition of meticulous is “showing great attention to detail; very careful and precise.” In your opinion, can a lawyer ever research a subject as meticulously as a computer programme? Or, do you believe that a computer programme will never be as meticulous as a lawyer? • The article says that consultancy group McKinsey estimates that 22 percent of a lawyer’s job can be automated. Do you believe this is the case? If it is true, do you welcome this, or do you see it as a threat to your livelihood? • Todd Solomon, a partner at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, says “There are fewer opportunities for young lawyers to get trained, and that’s the case outside of AI already.” If AI reduces training opportunities for young lawyers even more in the future, what ideas do you have about how you can ‘add value’ to what you can offer to an employer? What additional skills can you bring to the job? • ‘Loan servicing’ is the process of making sure that borrowers pay back the sum borrowed and all interest due on that sum as set out in the loan agreement. It also involves keeping records that affect the creditworthiness of the borrower when considering future loan applications. This information can be shared with other lenders. COIN is the contract intelligence programme used by JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the U.S.A. When the bank used the programme to service commercial loan agreements, it not only did the work faster, it also cut down on mistakes that were previously caused by human error. Is this efficiency, when used by many other organisations, worth the social cost of possibly making thousands of people around the world redundant? Or are they just free to do better things with their time? • Harvard offers courses in legal innovation and programming for lawyers. Do you have this opportunity? If not, would you be interested in doing this? If this meant dropping one subject from your law degree to allow time to study AI in law, which subject would you remove from your timetable? • Do you think corporate clients in your country would trust AI to do the work of a lawyer? If not, how long do you think it will take for this attitude to change?