AI And The Future Of Law At The #COLPM Futures Conference

AI has, at long last, come of age. What we do with it, generally and in the legal space, remains to be seen.

Last week, I attended the College of Law Practice Management’s 2017 Futures Conference. It was my first time attending and what lured me in was the focus of this year’s conference: artificial intelligence in law practice.

I have been greatly intrigued by the potential of AI and the law over the past year and, as a result, have been following and writing about AI trends and developments. So the prospect of a two-day conference devoted to the impact of AI on the practice of law was too enticing to pass up. So off to Atlanta I went.

One of my favorite sessions was the very first one: “Hype vs. Reality: Is Everything AI now?” The session promised to separate the hype from reality on the heels of a “breakout year for AI… with law firm after law firm outright adopting AI or experimenting with it, particularly… larger firms.”

This session provided a broad, down-to-earth overview of AI in the legal space, both in terms of its actual impact in 2017 and the many possibilities it will present in the coming years. The bottom line: AI is coming of age, and quickly, and the legal profession may not be prepared for the rapid pace of change instigated by AI in the years to come.

This money quote from Bill Gates that encapsulated this concept was shared near the beginning of the panel’s discussion:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next  2 years, but underestimate the change that will occur in 10.”

This line of thought is particularly applicable to AI. While rudimentary forms of AI have been used primarily in the the eDiscovery space for years now, true AI is only just now coming of age. As explained in The Second Machine Age, this is in large part because “many of the critical building blocks of computing — microchip density, processing speed, storage capacity, energy efficiency, download speed, and so on — have been improving at exponential rates for a long time,” while the cost of said technology has been declining at a dramatic rate.

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One of the panelists, Neota Logic’s Michael Mills, touched on this idea when he explained that AI combined with cloud computing provides previously unknown levels of computing power. It was then suggested that with the technological building blocks for AI in place, the legal space was ripe for the creative use of AI software. After all, AI and its logical output is based on inference, which mirrors the process of legal thinking. In other words, AI software is poised to replace the more basic and rudimentary legal tasks, allowing lawyers to focus on more complex, analytical thought processes.

Of course, if that happens, it follows then that the provision of legal services will necessarily become increasingly more efficient, resulting in a reduction of the always-sacred billable hour. So it wasn’t surprising that the conversation took a turn following a question from an audience member regarding whether the billable hour will survive the transition to AI in the legal space.

A variation of the fixed fee discussion that’s been going on for years followed, with many wondering when the majority of lawyers would get on board with the concept. Some mused that AI might just be the tipping point that will push more lawyers into adopting fixed fees. An interesting theory, but only time will tell.

One area that is particularly ripe for AI innovation is online legal research platforms, a topic I’ve covered in the past on Above the Law. So I was excited to catch up with Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase and a speaker at the conference.

I asked Ed about future plans to implement AI in Fastcase. He shared his excitement regarding the potential of AI for legal research generally, and also explained how AI is and will be incorporated into Fastcase: “We already use lightweight machine learning in Fastcase, using the history of tens of millions of searches to help report and rank new search results. So the more people use Fastcase, the more accurate the results become.  We’re also looking at AI tools to make Bad Law Bot a measurably more accurate citator than the traditional, editorial citators.  We’re also excited about the potential to use new tools for natural language search and to create a new topical indexing system, akin to West’s Key Number system, for finding related cases by topic. It’s an exciting time — we’ve had these ideas for more than a decade, but AI is finally good enough to build some mind-blowing tools. The time is now.”

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The time is now. Indeed. AI has, at long last, come of age. What we do with it, generally and in the legal space, remains to be seen.

Interested in learning more? For additional thoughts on the future of AI, the benefits of AI for lawyers, and the Futures conference, make sure to read my fellow Above the Law columnist Bob Ambrogi’s post, along with Jim Calloway’s thoughtful responsive post.


Niki BlackNicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

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