AI in Law and Legal Practice
Artificial Intelligence has been applied in the juridical domain for several years now. Edgar Alan Rayo researched the current state of AI in legal and wrote an interesting article.
He breaks down AI’s current legal applications into the three categories: applications helping lawyers perform due diligence and research; applications providing additional insights and “shortcuts” through analytics; applications automating creative processes (including some writing) in legal work.
Based on the assessment of current players, he proposes six major categories:
- Due diligence – Litigators perform due diligence with the help of AI tools to uncover background information. Contract review, legal research and electronic discovery are also included.
- Prediction technology – An AI software generates results that forecast litigation outcome.
- Legal analytics – Lawyers can use data points from past case law, win/loss rates and a judge’s history to be used for trends and patterns.
- Document automation – Law firms use software templates to create filled out documents based on data input.
- Intellectual property – AI tools guide lawyers in analyzing large IP portfolios and drawing insights from the content.
- Electronic billing – Lawyers’ billable hours are computed automatically.
He concludes that the most acknowledged benefit of AI tools in legal practice seems to be improving efficiency. AI software employs algorithms that speed up document processing while detecting for errors and other issues.