Whether or not you like it, as long as there are laws and conflicts, there will be the need for lawyers and legal assistance. While we may never replace human lawyers with fully autonomous AI counterparts, AI is already helping to make the legal profession more efficient and effective.
AI Assisting with Legal Research & Discovery
Laws are a uniquely human invention, with lawyers there to litigate on behalf of those who follow, or don’t follow, those laws. While machines don’t possess the sort of common sense necessary to truly interpret the nuance inherent in laws, there’s a lot of things that we can do using AI to make the legal industry more efficient, more effective, and more accessible to those who need it.
AI is already helping keep costs down by assisting with legal research and discovery. AI powered legal research platforms are able to use natural language processing to quickly analyze vast data stores of legal documents, case law, statutes, and regulations.
This gives legal teams who might not be familiar with specific industries, certain regions of the world, and legal precedents, the ability to gain insights that they would otherwise have to spend hours or days investigating. AI tools sift through this information to surface the key insights right away and provide potential legal arguments more efficiently than traditional methods.
AI is also helping to automate and improve the e-discovery process, which involves identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information from amongst huge troves of gathered information for legal proceedings. AI is really good at looking at large amounts of data quickly and being able to analyze that data to uncover key evidence or support.
Of course, AI systems aren’t perfect, so lawyers need to be careful to double-check machine work to avoid getting into legal hot water as has happened in the past when AI systems “hallucinated” and made up cases that were then presented in court.
Furthermore, AI is assisting with due diligence processes that are needed in funding, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and similar transactions by automating the review of large volumes of documents, contracts, and financial records. AI tools can identify potential risks, liabilities, and compliance issues more quickly and accurately than manual review processes, ensuring thorough and efficient due diligence.
AI-Augmented Assistance with Document Management and Preparation
A whole lot of law is really about dealing with electronic and paper documents and written content. Laws are written content, interpretations of laws are written content, and people are making decisions based on this written content that has been developed over time.
Just as the media industry is all about content creation and engagement, the legal industry is not that far from that, if you think about it. It just happens to be that all the content is written in the form of laws and in a very domain-specific language, subject to interpretations. Even the judges don’t always agree on those interpretations. That’s why we have courts and appeals courts and at the highest level, supreme courts.
There’s many ways that AI is being used throughout that whole process. Foremost, AI is generating many legal documents, from highly transactional and boilerplate legal filings and paperwork to more sophisticated contracts and legal arguments. AI platforms are also being applied to interpret legal documents prepared by others, identifying key clauses and flag risks, helping with ensuring compliance, suggesting revisions, maintaining consistency across documents, and reducing a lot of the time and effort needed to handle complex documents.
Whereas it might have taken paralegals many billable hours to read and process these documents, AI systems can handle the documents in a matter of minutes and surface insights that perhaps even trained professionals are unable to discern.
Legal-heavy governmental agencies such as intellectual property, patent, and trademark offices are using AI to help with IP search and office filings to identify prior art, determine the key claims in a filing, and assist with multilingual searches across worldwide IP and content databases.
On the document generation front, AI is automating the creation of legal documents, especially the sorts of documents that are very repetitive such as wills, contracts, and court filings. With proper legal oversight, AI systems are reducing time and effort to produce accurate legal documents. AI systems are also helping with intellectual property filings and monitoring, keeping an eye out on the Internet for potential infringements, prior art, or related IP data.
AI-Augmented Legal Operations
As is the case in many industries, the legal industry is often bogged down with processes that make delivery of services less efficient. The best applications of AI are as an augmented intelligence tool that doesn’t replace humans, but just helps them do their job better. One of those areas of legal operations in determining whether or not cases are worth pursuing based on time, complexity, and expense.
AI is seeing increasing use analyzing historical case data to help predict the likely outcomes of legal disputes. Because it’s augmented intelligence, the human makes the final decision, but the AI system gives you an idea of whether or not you really should move forward.
The legal industry is also making increasing use of AI powered chatbots to help with client interaction. Law firms and legal departments often handle a lot of routine inquiries that can easily be shifted to automated, intelligent chatbots that don’t require the use of expensive counsel. AI chatbots are now able to handle a lot of those routine client inquiries, provide basic legal information, assist with case intake, and handle general inquiries that law firms don’t need to tie up expensive human resources handling.
These AI systems reduce response times, improve client satisfaction, and free up the human experts to do more complex tasks. These systems not only help to reduce the cost for the client and law firm, but also make legal services more accessible to those who might be resource constrained.
AI systems can also provide legal analytics by processing large datasets to uncover trends, patterns, and insights related to legal cases, judicial behavior, and law firm performance. This information helps law firms make data-driven decisions, optimize their strategies, and improve client outcomes.
AI systems are also helping improve compliance and risk management by helping legal professionals monitor and manage compliance with regulations and industry standards. AI-driven compliance tools analyze business operations, identify potential legal risks, and ensure adherence to regulatory requirements.
So while AI won’t fully replace humans in the legal industry, the increasing use of AI will make the legal profession more efficient, more effective, keep costs down, make lawyers better at what they do, improve customer satisfaction, help make legal help more accessible, and maybe even make the legal industry better.
