Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Practice of Law
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Author | By Rob Toews |
By Rob Toews
Rob Toews is a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners in San Francisco. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
At close to a trillion dollars globally, legal services is one of the largest markets in the world. At the same time, it remains profoundly underdigitized. Law is tradition-bound and notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. This will change. More than any technology before it, artificial intelligence (AI) will dramatically transform the practice of law. Indeed, this process is already underway.
The law is in many ways particularly conducive to using AI and machine learning. Machine learning and law operate according to strikingly similar principles: they both look to historical examples to infer rules to apply to new situations. Among the social sciences, law may come closest to a system of formal logic. Legal rulings apply axioms derived from precedent to particular facts to reach a conclusion. This logic-oriented methodology is exactly the type of activity to which machine intelligence can fruitfully be applied. A few practice areas are particularly promising for AI.
Contracts are the lifeblood of our economic system. Yet negotiating and finalizing contracts is painfully tedious as practiced today. Lawyers manually review, edit, and exchange red-lined documents in seemingly endless iterations. This process can be lengthy, delaying deals and impeding business objectives. Mistakes due to human error are common — no surprise given that attention to minutiae is essential and contracts can be thousands of pages long.
There is tremendous opportunity to automate this process. Startups are currently working toward this vision, developing AI systems that can automatically ingest proposed contracts, analyze them using natural language processing (NLP) technology, and determine which portions of a contract are acceptable and which are problematic.
Currently, such systems are designed to operate with a human in the loop: A lawyer reviews the AI's analysis to make final decisions about contractual language. But as NLP capabilities advance, it is easy to imagine a future where the entire process is carried out end-to-end by AI, empowered with preprogrammed parameters, and designed to hammer out agreements.
While this may sound futuristic, large businesses like Salesforce, Home Depot, and eBay are already using AI-powered...
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