Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at the first artificial intelligence "attorney" to be hired by a major U.S. law firm and what it means for the future of AI and the legal industry.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp73
The IBM cognitive computer Watson first hit widespread public awareness a few years ago when the computer took on various challenges including the game show Jeopardy. This was notable because the clues in Jeopardy use a lot of grammar and word tricks to hint at the desired answers, which is a level of language context which was difficult for AI's to accurately understand before Watson.
Now this technology is beginning to be applied in some real-world contexts. One of these is a shopper assistance robot being tested certain retail stores like Lowes. But this week, the Watson computer upgraded to the next level of profession as an AI attorney called Ross based on IBM's Watson technology was officially hired to work in the bankruptcy department of Baker & Hosteler, a department with 50+ attorneys in a large national law firm.
Although reports have it that other law firms are also licensing to use Ross, Baker is the first to jump in the pool officially. But will this be the first step to removing all those human attorney-types like yours truly with soulless automations of the law?
Probably not, although cognitive computing like Ross could change the legal services industry just like robotics and machinery changed manufacturing years ago. What Ross claims to offer is a rapid jump in efficiency in legal research and case law updates.
For example, Ross is able to take questions in plain English, and then it reads through the entire body of relevant law and returns an answer with citations from legislation and case law to bring the questioner up to speed quickly. Unlike current legal research tools like Lexis and Westlaw, Ross narrows the results to a few highly relevant answers instead of thousands and provides answers in a casual, understandable language like a human colleague would. Plus, Ross monitors for law updates and informs the user when changes occur, while also learning from experience to gain speed and improve results over time.
This is the type of work that typically gets assigned to junior-level attorneys and legal assistants, which means that some of the overhead with law practice can be shifted to work on other types of projects. That should allow firms to more efficiently use time and money of clients to reach desired results, but there's still going to be a human hand involved thanks to the heavy regulation applied to the legal services industry, among other things.
But who knows, maybe Ross will pass the bar exam in a few states, and then the sky is the limit on how far this cognitive computer technology can go.
The Bottom Line is, even the Baker firm refers to technologies like Ross as an AI legal assistant instead of an attorney, and there's a long way to go before we can replace all those attorneys. Nevertheless, this is the type of AI we only dreamed of previously in shows like Star Trek, and the legal profession as well as others can only stand to benefit and get better as a result.
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Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy
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