In the field of artificial intelligence, corporations are always looking for new methods to build technology that will manage tedious activities in many sectors with greater speed and precision. In the legal industry, AI has already been shown to be a valuable tool for both attorneys and clients.

Paralegals, legal researchers, and litigators are being squeezed out of their jobs by the rising interest in bringing artificial intelligence to the legal profession.

In the age of AI disruption, law firms and professional services organizations rely on AI research and advising services to determine how AI might enhance the workflows of their professionals.

These findings highlight the many ways AI is now used in the legal profession, as well as how technology companies are striving to expedite work procedures, which are discussed in this article. We categorize AI’s existing legal uses as follows:

  • Assistance with due diligence and research for attorneys

  • Using analytics to provide extra insights and “shortcuts”

  • Automating legal work’s creative processes, including some writing

  • For our last remarks, we’ll examine the potential and limits of artificial intelligence (AI) for legal professionals.

AI in legal practice is now being used in a variety of ways. Legal and technological experts like Richard Susskind predict that this tendency will continue to develop in the future years in the United Kingdom and elsewhere throughout Europe.

What is artificial intelligence?

The influence of artificial intelligence on the legal profession must be defined first. If artificial intelligence is used in the legal sector, it might be deceptive. I don’t mean walking and talking Terminator robot with a briefcase and tie (though that would be pretty cool). The term cognitive computing may be a better one, and it is gaining in use today. The goal is to teach computers how to learn and reason. 

To fulfill activities previously performed by people, cognitive tools are taught rather than coded. The focus is on detecting patterns in data, evaluating the data, and giving findings. It may also be a research assistant who can go through the deck and report back to you what it found. Exactly why does this matter? There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, according to IBM. If you don’t know what a quint is, it’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data. Any human being’s capacity to analyze and grasp such a large amount of material without assistance is impossible.

Going deeper

Moore’s Law is to blame for the current boom in AI. The number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits has increased every year since their creation, according to Gordon Moore, an Intel scientist. Computer power will double about every two years according to his law, but the cost of that computing power will decrease. More computers for less money, in other words. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) skills and availability are on the rise as the cost of storing electronic data continues to fall. Analysts anticipate that corporations will spend $47 billion on artificial intelligence by 2020, an increase of over 600%. For one simple reason, AI expenditure has skyrocketed in recent years: Freeing humans from mundane activities that computers can perform may result in substantial productivity improvements and cost savings, letting people focus on jobs that genuinely bring value, those that computers can’t or can’t do well. In future episodes of this series, we’ll evaluate how well this objective reasoning works with the legal business in general. 

It is more vital than ever that legal departments are prepared for this transformation and adapt rapidly to the use of artificial intelligence. Several MBA schools, for example, offer AI classes. Courses on AI applications have been introduced to the curriculum at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and France’s INSEAD School of Business, among other top-tier MBA schools. In time, CEOs and CFOs will expect additional members of the C-Suite, such as general counsel and the legal department, to adopt AI. Law firms that adopt artificial intelligence will become more valuable to the next generation of CEOs, CFOs, and board members.

AI in Law: Current Applications – Insights Up Front

As we surveyed firms and products in the legal sector, we found that there are six main kinds of AI applications.

  • Due diligence – Litigators use AI techniques to find background information as part of their due diligence. In this area, we’ve opted to incorporate contract review, legal research, and electronic discovery.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) predicts the outcome of a lawsuit with the use of the software.

  • Law firm analytics – Lawyers can utilize data points from prior case law, win/loss statistics, and a judge’s record to identify patterns.

  • Using software templates, law firms may produce papers depending on data input.

  • Ai technologies let attorneys analyze huge IP portfolios and gain insights from the content by using artificial intelligence (AI).

  • Lawyers’ billable hours are calculated automatically using electronic billing.

Concluding Thoughts 

The adoption of AI in law businesses does raise a lot of questions: can lawyers actually use AI? Which AI legal-tech applications can become mainstream shortly?

Well, AI in law and the legal profession might be a “catch-22” situation. 

Improved efficiency appears to be the most well-known benefit of AI technologies in legal practice. Algorithms in AI software speed up document processing while also identifying mistakes and other problems in the content.

Since the legal profession has historically been based on “billable hours,” it does not make sense for a lawyer to complete a task or document more quickly than necessary. Consequently, removing manual (or tedious) activities will not likely be enough to spur the adoption of AI in law practice.

As a result, peer pressure will likely be the driving force behind the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast, legal companies without the ability to automate are more inclined to overcharge their customers for services that other firms have essentially automated away.

It’s not obvious how the shift to lawful AI will take place, either. On the one hand, we may anticipate major legal firms to be the first to implement AI-based tools and integrations since they have the most money to spend. But because they don’t have to cope with the huge overhead of larger businesses, newer firms are more likely to start with a lean, automated, efficiency-driven strategy.

Legodesk for Law and Professional Services Firms

We at Legodesk, the only integrated solution provider for lawyers, assist legal and professional services firms to discover how AI technologies, such as natural language processing, may free up their schedule to focus on high-return work for a greater number of customers.

In professional services, executives and partners are less inclined to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) than their counterparts in other industries, leaving them more susceptible to misleading marketing by artificial intelligence (AI) suppliers. 

Firms may use AI Opportunity Landscapes to rate AI suppliers in their sector, saving them from spending thousands of dollars on trial projects with vendors that are unlikely to produce a positive return on investment.

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