While artificial intelligence is an often-misunderstood concept, it’s already widely used in areas like retail sales and online advertising — and making inroads in the law.
In a recent Non-Eventcast, host Jared Correia talks with Nathan Wenzel of SimpleLegal and Alex Smith of iManage to nail down just what “artificial intelligence” refers to, specific ways it’s being used, and what lawyers should be doing now to capitalize.
Read on for an excerpt from this discussion detailing two use cases (lightly edited for length and clarity). And while you’re here, feel free to browse prior editions of the Non-Eventcast in the Law Practice Management Software, Legal Document Management Software, and Legal Operations Contract Lifecycle Management rooms of the ATL Non-Event.
Jared Correia: It’s the lightning round! I’ve got the same question for both of you: Can you give one specific legal business use case for AI that people can hang their hats on?
Nathan Wenzel: Sure. One of the ways you can use AI is to do things that are particularly dangerous in industry — or in the case I’ll give here, particularly boring and, probably negative ROI if you do this by hand.
In our world, which is matter management/spend management — and it comes out of the insurance defense world — is bill review. No in-house attorney wants to actually look at a bill. But we’re kind of taught to do that.
And again, it kind of came out of the insurance world, which is a little bit backwards anyway, but it is, you know, “Should I pay for this or should I not pay for this?”
So, if you can, rather than turn some rule-set loose on a bill, you can turn the machine learning or AI engine loose on it, then you can stop reviewing bills. It might feel trivial, but oh my gosh. Could you imagine not having to review legal bills anymore as an in-house attorney? That would be fantastic.
Jared: I think some people may have just passed out listening to this. Did you say stop reviewing bills?
Nathan: Yes, I think that the idea of an attorney looking at a bill to look for, you know, “Oh I found some copy charges here. I found some stuff there.” It’s a broken process. I believe it’s actually negative ROI.
It came out of the insurance world, which has a weird kind of three-party: There’s the insured, the carrier, and the law firm, as opposed to corporate, where it’s just you and your firm.
But it’s just a thing that we all do. And I think that this is a great use case and one that we’re pretty happy to tackle.
Jared: You undersold that. You said that was gonna be boring, not boring at all. That’s very exciting for most attorneys.
Alex, your turn. Can you top that? Business use case for AI in law firms?
Alex Smith: I like contract review. So one of my favorites would be papering. There are quite a lot of exercises that happen in law firms for repapering things. Libor’s happening at the moment. Brexit for us happened. You have to go back over a lot of contracts.
So the AI improving and extracting things and getting you quicker to answers and advice, and then trying to automate some of that repapering was interesting.
And what I find interesting having worked in a firm was, if you’re doing the exercise anyway, capture a few extra data points, because it’s amazing what you’ll find in your client’s contract sets.
And then suddenly those become your business development opportunities down the line for what else is in these contracts — “what other work should you be doing” rather than just thinking about it as “what am I doing right now.”
So thinking about the data in the contracts and thinking about them, not just as, “how do I get the job done,” but, “what’s my next opportunity in this contract set.”
Jared: I’ll say those are two pretty impressive things. I think if a lawyer is listening to this, “less bill review,” “less contract management,” those are both really good things.
So see, AI is OK, everybody! No need to worry. Step back off the ledge.
Highlights
- AI is simple and complicated at the same time – 2:13
- AI: a misunderstood concept – 4:14
- AI is just math – 6:16
- Unsupervised and supervised machine learning – 9:18
- What lawyers should be doing – 14:28
- Ways to use AI – 16:28
