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Artificial Intelligence (Al) has captivated legal
thinkers in recent years, as law firms, law schools,
and in-house counsel have all dived into the well
of possible applications. Law librarians are already
starting to use Al tools to create practical solutions
to intractable problems in knowledge management
and business intelligence. What does legal Al
actually look like as it is used today, and how are
information professionals taking advantage of
what Al has to offer?
e often think of untagged legacy data as well, making
AI as powering curation and management practically
third-party, end- impossible.
to-end software, Tagging or structuring this data
such as that for would be expensive and laborious
e-discovery. But requiring large investments of human
increasingly, law libraries are applying capital and time. However, law firms
Al tools to legal problems and tasks are starting to use supervised learning to
in a pragmatic way. Everything from extract information such as the author
research to litigation analysis has of a document, its date, the client, or
already been enhanced by Al tools. the court in which the parties appeared.
Al is eliminating some brute-force In addition, IBM Watson has
tasks that people least like to do and, developed machine learning and deep
at the same time, making it much learning tools that allow users to cre-
easier to do many routine tasks, such ate their own models for comparative
as find patterns, extract metadata, analysis and custom visualization.
or support important decisions with Similarly, Watson's Natural Language
empirical data. Understanding module can unearth
trends in both structured and unstruc-
Knowledge Management tured data, such as relations between
It's now harder than ever to maintain entities.
order in knowledge management Firms are also using rule-based AI
(KM) systems, especially when there systems such as Neota Logic to capture
are so many law firm mergers and knowledge held by lawyers in the firm,
acquisitions. Even highly organized creating expert decision trees as guides
firms inherit systems that are messy or for later efforts by the firm and driving
structured differently. Many firms have efficiency for clients.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 1AALL SPECTRUM 17
BiLLing and Analytics Hostetler won the 2017 AALL Annual rather than argue over the language
Firms that collect clean data are able to Meeting Innovation Tournament with used to express those terms.
take full advantage of that information a chatbot that performed a similar Similarly ContraxSuite from
and leverage it against administrative lawyer-facing job. LexPredict allows users to search
tasks. Client intake forms, matter man- Tools such as Lex Machina from through contracts to identify legal
agement, litigation budgeting, and fee LexisNexis and Docket Alarm from trends and group them into different
structuring have all been assisted by AI Fastcase have used artificial intelligence categories based on legal content and
in recent years. An example is Digitory to extract information from dockets, metadata. Standard analysis approaches
Legal, which helps firms develop com- pleadings, motions, and opinions to (such as due diligence review) can be
petitive pricing models, so in-house help users understand parties, lawyers, applied across document groups.
legal departments stay under budget law firms, and judges. These tools and The technology is promising, so
when hiring outside counsel by tracking services have also used big data to help much so that the HarvardBusiness Review
trends in past billing data. firms and clients price risk and make recently published an article titled
Chatbots can also be used to fos- better strategic decisions in litigation. "How AI is Changing Contracts," in
ter a more efficient workflow in the which doctoral candidate Beverly Rich
office. Instead of searching through Contract Analysis argued that applying AI, and potentially
files and folders, employees can use Drafting contracts is one of the most blockchain, to contract drafting will
natural language queries to ask a bot formulaic tasks lawyers participate in, soon be useful to all law firms, not just
to retrieve documents, or bots can but version control and consistency can those in the BigLaw sector.
work as organization-wide assistants, often be a chore. Several tools on the
connecting employees who are working market today remove the most tedious Legal Research
on similar matters in different loca- elements of contract drafting. AI tools are not only replacing some
tions. Katherine Lowry from Baker ContractStandards is a company human review in legal research, they
that helps drafters use machine learning are also creating new types of research
to standardize contract language across tasks. For example, lawyers at Casetext,
documents and manage contract tem- ROSS Intelligence, andJudicata have
Al tools are not only replacing plates. The result is contracts that follow created tools that analyze briefs for
some human review in legal unified rules across teams, making every completeness and accuracy based on
research, they are also creating step of the negotiation process easier. the language in the brief, the cases
new types of research tasks. Parties can negotiate terms of deals, cited, and the context.
Fastcase created the world's first
algorithmic citator, Bad Law Bot, which
extracts negative citation history directly
from the text of judicial opinions and
their citations. Fastcase also uses the
information architecture of citations,
the map of citations in a list of search
results, as well as software that learns
from the aggregate search history of the
database to rank the most important
search results at the top of the list.
Personality Insights
The other major application for AI in
the legal space lies in the area of per-
sonality insights.
Recently, the Seventh Circuit's
Judge Richard Posner retired amidst
claims that his colleagues were unduly
biased against pro se litigants. It
may soon be possible to accurately
predict judicial outcomes and prove
such claims of bias by analyzing the
"personality" of opinion writers and
aggregating their past decisions with
Al tools.
18 AALL SPECTRUM I WWW.AALLNET.ORG
Who will be the makers in this
new era of read/write artificial
intelligence? It would be natural
for the law firms' experts in legal
information, law librarians,
to have the central role.
Relatedly, AI can already be used to baseline of competence, just as using a and the training in ontologies and legal
draw simpler conclusions about per- citator became a mandatory tool in the information. We are right on the cusp
sonalities, such as which expert witness 1900s. These read-only AI tools and of a new age of legal services powered
is most aligned with a client's interests. their use are the new floor. by artificial intelligence, and the time is
Expert databases such as Courtroom The ceiling will be defined by read/ now for law librarians to learn how to
Insight andJurisPro give users the write tools which law libraries will use these new tools.
ability to discover which experts have build themselves and how they are
the most experience in achieving the used. When law firms harness the vast
desired outcome before specific judges. expertise in their document repositories,
Law firms are also using data from billing systems, and human experts,
these expert witness databases, in com- they can create data training sets that
AALL2go EXTRA
bination with their own firm's data, to are unique. Using AI tools, they can Watch the 2018 AALL Annual Meeting
create highly customized understand- build the next generation of legal ser- program "Powered by Al, Built in the Law
ings of expert witnesses. vices, truly differentiated from the offer- Library," at bit.ly/AM18AI.
ings of other firms, and of accounting
Moving Forward READ
firms that wish to break into the legal
Ed Walters's article Read/Write: Artificial
Although some worry that artificial services market but who don't have the Intelligence Libraries," from the September/
intelligence is over-hyped, it is nev- historical legal data on which to build. October 2017 issue of AALL Spectrum at
ertheless true that AI is already here Who will be the makers in this bit.ly/SO16Allibraries.
and being used effectively by an increas- new era of read/write artificial intelli-
ing number of firms. For years, firms gence? It would be natural for the law
have been subscribing to tools that firms' experts in legal information, law
incorporate AI for tasks such as e-dis- librarians, to have the central role. Law
covery, docket analytics, and contract librarians have expertise with enterprise
review. Indeed, use of these types of legal data, great access to KM systems
read-only tools is becoming the new and document management systems,
Washington, DC
Ed Walters is the CEO of Fastcase, an online legal research software company based in
Washington, DC. He practiced law at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC, and Brussels.
Walters teaches The Law of Robots at Georgetown University Law Center and at Cornell
Tech in New York City He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of
Chicago Law School, and the editor of Data-DrivenLaw (Taylor & Francis, 2018).
Morgan Wright is a product manager at Fastcase and publisher of theJournal of Robotics,
Artificial Intellgence & Law (RAIL). She earned her undergraduate degree from Hood College
and her law degree from the University of Richmond School of Law She has worked at the
Institute for Actual Innocence and the Office of the Capital Defender in Virginia, as well as Washington, DC
in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 1AALL SPECTRUM 19
