Role of AI in Legal landscape

 

                                                  Role of  AI in legal landscape

                                                                                                -Rishiraj Chandan

How AI changing the legal landscape? Is AI coming for lawyers?

Recently, a number of sectors have embraced AI successfully and not just on small scale. This extends to automated entertainment systems, cell phones, and robotic concierges in hotels. The introduction of AI has caused disruption in several markets.

AI in Legal profession: India

Given that the country's legal system has seen little technological innovation in recent years, lawyers in India are satisfied with and dependent on tried-and-true practises and solutions that were devised many years ago. In India, the job of lawyers and how people view the law are two areas where artificial intelligence may have a big influence.

The use of AI in the legal system has the potential to profoundly change the field of legal study. Legal knowledge in India is huge and constantly changing, but with the aid of AI, lawyers might have immediate, thorough, and precise insight into the whole legal system. Legal research presently requires a lot of man hours, which significantly reduces a law firm's ability to make money. However, artificial intelligence might bring the whole legal community together. Artificial intelligence may assist you in producing the same high-quality findings from your legal research in a fraction of the time it now takes, regardless matter whether you are a single practitioner or a law firm with 400 attorneys. It may provide lawyers access to cutting-edge tools that will enable them to represent clients' interests in court more effectively. In order to help law firms conduct more thorough and effective research than is possible with keywords alone, a number of Indian legal tech startups are developing and releasing NLP-based applications and next-generation legal research platforms. These startups include SpotDraft, CaseMine, NearLaw, Pensieve, Practise League, etc. A rising number of legal technology companies have significant research capabilities in AI, and several of them even have their own specialised AI labs.

Analysis:

I want to refer to an article I recently read in the New York Times where I read a report  of researchers at Princeton University University of Pennsylvania and New York University that concluded that the industry which is most exposed to the new AI was ‘legal services’. Another research report by economists at Goldman Sachs estimated that 44% of legal work could be automated in the future.

So, this begs the question that our lawyers are going to be endangered species? To answer this question, Only in some ways would be the perfect answer,what's really interesting about this technology is how it empowers how we practice law. If we think about every practice area that a lawyer could work in we fundamentally are dealers in information. We Gather it, we analyze it, we add our legal Acumen to it, and then we deliver it. So, any kind of tools that make any of those steps easier is going to have an impact on how we practice law. What's even more interesting to us is that it's not that AI is going to replace lawyers, it's that lawyers who use AI are going to replace lawyers who don't. So, what we need to think about is how do we take advantage of this technology without it disrupting how we do business exactly!

We can think that obviously it will make lawyers more productive but there are some things that AI can't do which is like building client relationships, exercising judgment. When it comes to really complex matters, are there any other kind of things that a robot will never be able to replace? It really is the human relationship and the strategy! The interesting thing about this technology is that it is it is embedded in what we've done in the past. So, all the data that these algorithms and other AI systems are built upon are what happened before, so the risk is that the answers that these things spit out are based upon what we've done before. But what we've done before isn't always the best thing. Lawyers very often want to find the answer but sometimes the answer needs to change or we need to progress in the law or we need to be able to push against these boundaries that we've had in the past. These systems aren't going to be able to do that.

Conclusion: Way Ahead

There are certain things that’s tremendous work by AI like they are really good at describing things that have happened. Think of an internal investigation or a litigation, pouring through massive quantities of data to figure out what happened. But they aren't so good at predicting what's going to happen in particular case which is something that lawyers are hired for all the time. Imagine what if my company asks “how is the either the market or the regulator is going to react if I take this particular decision?” Then there's a requirement for lawyers to figure out what is the essence of being a lawyer and analyse or predict ramifications of particular decision taken. Historically we charge by the hour but I'm not so sure that in every case the time that we spend on something equates to the value of that legal work or legal solution. That's the part we're trying to figure out now as to how do we capture the essence of what it means to be a lawyer now enabled by technology. And what is the what is the proper price for that!

AI is clearly challenging the state of school of traditional law firms. So, is it plausible to think that business models might change going forward in short term or long term? we are going to be driving that change in model and as we should. The problem with the legal profession generally has been that it has been resistance to technology that bestows efficiency because if we charge by the hour and we become more efficient that we're handing that efficiency off to the client or the market it’s not profitable to us. That doesn't Inspire anybody, so what we're trying to do and what we must become successful in doing is how do I capture some of that efficiency gain for ourselves. It is basic Adam Smith theory of markets  and what we're looking at now is particular kinds of legal products and services that we can easily transpose into some other form of billing than by the hour. whether it's fixed fees or per unit or per task and that's what we're putting most of our attention. It's all about keeping the value for a clients right going forward.