When used and understood correctly, AI can help lawyers make informed, data-driven decisions and improve efficiency. Here, we`ll help you understand how it works by taking a closer look at the jargon and different definitions of AI that have permeated the legal industry. “Having worked in AI for the legal profession for a long time, I know how conservative the client base is,” says Thomson Reuters` Tonya Custis. “When searching for Westlaw in natural language, lawyers ask, `Why am I getting results that don`t use the specific words I searched for?` You need to explain to the customer how the process works. In this way, AI has a profound impact on legal practice. While AI will help rather than replace lawyers in the near future, it is already being used to review contracts, find relevant documents in the investigation process, and conduct legal research. More recently, AI has been used to draft contracts, predict legal outcomes, and even recommend court decisions on conviction or bail. Finally, the Bloomberg Law Points of Law feature shows how supervised machine learning can increase a lawyer`s efficiency. Guided by information from human-generated datasets, Points of Law extracts all important and relevant legal principles contained in court opinions. This helps lawyers dig up new relevant documents and more easily identify similarities between court opinions.
That`s where AI comes in. Natural language processing (NLP) is an AI technique that can help lawyers quickly gain insights from millions of unstructured data sources such as print books, legal websites, business databases, and historical records. By extending manual processes with AI, paralegals and lawyers can focus on more rewarding, higher-level tasks, such as working with clients. You wouldn`t use this language with your colleague because it doesn`t seem natural and because the query is too specific. In traditional legal research, applications must be specific to avoid raising thousands of irrelevant cases. But with such limited search terms, it`s easy to miss the perfect case. For example, you won`t find one explaining that a school is responsible for damages (not injuries) that occur off campus (not off campus). In the decades that followed, the whistleblowers were joined by a multitude of secondary sources, including treatises, reformulations, and various legal journals. The case reporters themselves were supplemented by “pocket pieces,” brochures placed in special pockets embedded in the covers of journalists` books that would update the cases contained in the journalist. (Lawyers of a certain year will remember the bag pieces, perhaps with nostalgia or perhaps with fear.) And even after the advent of official journalists, Gallacher continues, “legal research as a discipline was unknown; Lawyers had to read all the opinions a court had given to find out what the law was in that particular jurisdiction, and they had to comment on those opinions to keep up to date. In other words, early case reports included nothing but cases, without analysis, organization, or improvements such as summaries or top notes.
Insight Attorneys` initial group represents about 15 to 20 percent of Westlaw`s reference lawyers, according to Jon Meyer. But that number will increase as more and more research lawyers express interest in participating in the training program and more and more clients move to Westlaw Edge. Another area in which AI is already used extensively in legal practice is the conduct of legal research. Practicing lawyers may not even know that they are using AI in this area, as it has been seamlessly integrated into many research services. One such service is Westlaw Edge, which was launched more than three years ago by Thomson Reuters. The keyword or Boolean search approach, which has been the hallmark of the service for decades, has been complemented by semantic search. This means that machine learning algorithms try to understand the meaning of words and don`t just match them with keywords. Another example of Westlaw Edge`s AI-powered feature is Quick Check, which uses AI to analyze a draft argument to gain additional information or identify relevant authority that might have been overlooked.
Quick Check can even detect when a cited case has been indirectly resolved. The ABA report also found that 41 percent of attorneys said AI-based solutions would be most useful for increasing efficiency, followed by 24 percent who felt they would be most useful in document management and review. Cost reduction was cited by 21% of survey respondents as the most useful attribute of AI-based research, followed by prediction of outcomes and risk reduction (15%). Then, as MacLeod puts it, “the asteroid hit” – namely, the arrival of computerized legal databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis, where cases were continually published, updated and commented. These services were introduced in the 1970s and gained popularity dramatically during the PC revolution of the 1980s. Legal research will always be more complex and demanding than consumer research. Asking Alexa to tell you the weather is very different from asking questions about the constitutionality of a new law. But these higher expectations from the consumer industry are shifting into the legal space and leading lawyers to look for faster and more intuitive search tools. One thing that remains unchanged, however, is the importance of legal research. According to Don MacLeod, director of knowledge management at Debevoise & Plimpton and author of How to Find Out Anything and The Internet Guide for the Legal Researcher, it`s easy to nod to agree with anyone making this statement.
