In this article, we will explore four ways AI is transforming the legal profession. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in a number of industries, such as finance, healthcare, and commerce. However, its potential for use in the legal field is still being explored. With AI, the legal industry is experiencing unprecedented efficiencies and value. We will also look at some of the challenges that need to be overcome before AI can be successfully employed in this area.
Legal Contract Review
In-house legal departments spend approximately half of their time reviewing contracts, according to Gartner. The use of natural language processing (NLP) technologies can streamline the contract review process by automating contract analysis and identifying potentially problematic portions.
An artificial intelligence system can learn what typical terms and conditions a company usually tends to adopt from its library of historical contracts. It can then apply these learnings to new contracts to proactively flag areas that require review or sign-off from management as well suggest best practice clauses. Aside from optimizing the contract for consistency and compliance, using AI has the additional benefit that it avoids human errors. This results in substantial cost savings while creating room for contracts that are cleaner and more effective.
Moreover, most large companies have a lot of outstanding contracts across many divisions with a lot of counterparties. Therefore, it can be difficult to keep up with the details and commitments of each organization. When artificial intelligence is used to analyze existing agreements, enterprises and law firms can identify opportunities for process improvement. There are many different types of contracts that can be analyzed by artificial intelligence.
Litigation Prediction
Using artificial intelligence, it is now possible to predict court outcomes and evaluate risk in individual cases. Artificial intelligence, when used to predict the outcome of legal cases and predict the incidence of litigation, can be used to assist companies in planning their legal strategies. This reduces the number of cases that have to go to trial by expediting settlement negotiations.
The use of AI to predict litigation outcomes, however, is not without controversy. The FTC, among others, is concerned that AI may result in an unfair advantage for plaintiffs and make it difficult for defendants to defend themselves. In 2016, the European Commission proposed a framework for regulating AI, which included methods for ensuring transparency and accountability. Despite this debate, the use of AI in legal cases is growing, and the number of cases where it is deployed continues to rise.
Legal Research and E-Discovery
Legal research is usually done by hand by junior associates and young attorneys, who review various cases to gain an understanding of them accurately. AI-driven solutions that search for similar cases in thousands of laws and regulations can help departments save time and find similar cases. Legal AI technologies can scan thousands of laws and regulations very quickly. This allows for fast and accurate research that is not possible with the traditional process, which requires hours of manual reading, analysis, and cross-referencing.
A substantial portion of the expense accrued by legal departments is attributed to electronic discovery. AI can help businesses avoid unforeseen fees during electronic discovery processes, handle large data volumes to create connections with different, disparate information assets, and provide insight to legal departments. This enables faster electronic discovery processes and reduces legal review costs. AI uses statistical methods and machine learning to automatically extract and organize data for discovery. This enables access to data in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months. AI is also able to determine relationships between different sources of information, which helps reduce the number of documents required to be reviewed.
As Artificial Intelligence transforms every industry, the legal sector is no exception. For more articles like this one, visit Omega’s website.
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