Artificial intelligence doesn’t equal artificial perfection. I have argued for a while now both on this blog and in a forthcoming law review article here that lawyers (and the investigators who work for them) have little to fear and much to gain as artificial intelligence gets smarter. Computers may be able to do a lot more than they used to, but there is so much more information for them to sort through that humans will…

An entire day at a conference on artificial intelligence and the law last week in Chicago produced this insight about how lawyers are dealing with the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence: Many lawyers are like someone who knows he needs to buy a car but knows nothing about cars. He knows he needs to get from A to B each day and wants to get there faster. So, he is deposited at the largest auto…

Do you ever wonder why some gifted small children play Mozart, but you never see any child prodigy lawyers who can draft a complicated will? The reason is that the rules of how to play the piano have far fewer permutations and judgment calls than deciding what should go into a will. “Do this, not that” works well with a limited number of keys in each octave. But the permutations of a will are infinite.…

We’ve had a great response to an Above the Law op-ed here that outlined the kinds of skills lawyers will need as artificial intelligence increases its foothold in law firms. The piece makes clear that without the right kinds of skills, many of the benefits of AI will be lost on law firms because you still need an engaged human brain to ask the computer the right questions and to analyze the results. But too…

Decent investigators and journalists everywhere ought to have been outraged at news over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal that appears to have caught a corporate investigator masquerading as a Journal reporter. According to the story, the person trying to get information about investment strategy and caught on tape pretending to be someone he wasn’t was “Jean-Charles Brisard, a well-known corporate security and intelligence consultant who lives in Switzerland and France.” Fake news we…

Just back from the ABA’s family law conference where I gave a talk on asset searching, I heard a wonderful talk from the “father of unbundling” of legal services, Forrest “Woody” Mosten. He is a high priced divorce lawyer practicing in Beverly Hills, and yet makes a great living in never going to court. Instead, he lets others do that and spends a lot of time working for an hour or two at a…

Anyone following artificial intelligence in law knows that its first great cost saving has been in the area of document discovery. Machines can sort through duplicates so that associates don’t have to read the same document seven times, and they can string together thousands of emails to put together a quick-to-read series of a dozen email chains. More sophisticated programs evolve their ability with the help of human input. Law firms are already saving their…