Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are reshaping the way the legal industry operates. They are shifting focus from time-consuming and expensive workflows to efficient investigation of data and proactive ways to prevent emerging problems from spreading. More generally, use of AI is making legal services more accessible and providing lawyers with more powerful tools to find evidence and resolve cases in a fair and comprehensive way.
Use of AI Is Improving the Legal Industry in Three Main Ways:
- AI can make the process of analyzing large volumes of data more efficient and effective. AI models analyze combinations of large numbers of features to prioritize documents for analysis and review, extracting patterns from the data that can be hard to spot during a linear document review process. They can detect content too complex for keyword searches, such as emotions and conceptual relatedness.
- AI can shift focus from document review to investigative data analysis. AI technologies may allow users to find evidence directly, for example through identifying anomalies in communication behavior or analyzing named entities, thus reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive linear review.
- Pre-trained AI model libraries reduce cost and streamline workflows. They make it possible to transfer knowledge and expertise gained on previous cases to jump-start work on new cases that are related. They can also create innovative solutions tuned to the specific expertise of a particular law firm or legal service provider, including new legal workflows such as proactive investigations.
AI Isn’t Replacing Lawyers—It’s Giving Them Superpowers
AI is reshaping the way legal professionals gain fast and powerful insights into data to uncover evidence. As lawyers and other legal professionals continue to adopt AI for use in their everyday activities and workflows, they can extend their abilities far beyond what can be achieved today. Leaning on AI to tap into enormous reservoirs of data and find potentially meaningful patterns, users can enhance how they perform every task they take on. By providing opportunities to extract valuable information from the data that can be further combined to uncover facts, events and stories and not merely find documents, AI has the potential to amplify legal minds and empower them with the information they need to make better fact-driven case decisions.
AI can also serve as a great equalizer and component to facilitating the rule of law. If effective deployment of AI can help legal professionals more quickly and cost-efficiently uncover critical information as they develop case strategy, it can help them better comply with obligations for proportionality and fairness and expand access to justice.
But, while AI will continue to play an increasingly important, it will not (and should not) eliminate or change the most fundamental parts of the legal process. AI should supercharge legal minds, but not seek to replace them.
AI in Action
While organizations all over the world have leveraged the power of AI, shedding light on just a couple of examples can make the case for the tremendous advantages it offers to investigations and legal teams.
In one instance, an international government investigation needed to organize a review of 12.5 million documents that included multiple languages on a tight production deadline. By using Reveal-Brainspace’s Continuous Multimodal Learning (CMML), the client was able to significantly reduce the review population from 1.8 million to 280,000 documents, an 85% reduction in review volume. In the end, the savings on this case totaled approximately 19,000 hours of review time and more than $750,000.
In another example, the investigations team at a major tech company used an AI model framework to build and train predictive risk models from previous investigation experiences. Previous case experiences, data models, and intellectual property were packaged into the Reveal “Model Library,” where the technology was deployed globally for repeatable and scalable risk testing. The use of the advanced AI platform increased the team’s audit capacity by an estimated 400%.
AI Adoption Requires Changing the Status Quo
As with each new technology, the biggest barrier preventing AI from improving the legal industry is the power of the status quo. The legal industry broadly, and individual organizations and professionals, are going to change their ways only if they perceive that the likely gain is significant enough to warrant the costs associated with changing.
Despite the massive time and cost savings that properly applied legal AI affords practitioners, many organizations still find that legal practitioners are hesitant to fully embrace the technology. However, as more and more large and reputable firms, legal service providers, and in-house legal teams adopt AI and tout its transformational power, others will have to take notice or find themselves at a massive competitive disadvantage.
Legal AI as a Force Multiplier in the Digital Age
It’s an exciting time to be working at the intersection of AI and the legal profession, as the last eighteen months have served as a tipping point for legal AI adoption. The work-from-home revolution has precipitated the largest legal shift to the cloud, and as a result, opened up an immense number of possibilities for cloud-native AI. The cloud has enabled many organizations to have greater access to legal AI and this shift, combined with the explosion in both variety and volume of data, has created a perfect storm to entice even the most tech-wary to start embracing legal AI.
