Law

The big companies developing them show no interest in fixing the problem.

In the first of the three leading-edge sessions on artificial intelligence at this year's ILTACon, folks will be hearing from Martin Tully, Co-Chair, of Akerman LLP's Data Law Practice, and Samuel Whitman, Mayer Brown's Knowledge Management Leader (see below for speaker bios). Samuel Whitman is Mayer Brown's Knowledge Management Leader and is a member of the Firm's working group on artificial intelligence. Samuel's extensive experience includes working with Professional Support Lawyers, partners and other Firm leaders to develop standard forms, implement document automation, create matter process pathways, configure electronic closing binders and raise awareness among lawyers of KM's best practices and policies. After law school, Samuel became a Project Finance Associate in White & Case's London office and later joined White & Case's Knowledge Management team in New York.

At the recent LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions' InterAction Share event in London, I shared with delegates my insight and advice in relation to the rise of smart technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), robots and machine learning in the legal ecosystem and how these technologies are being, and will be, deployed in the industry. It's important to realise and understand that it is inevitable that the roles of lawyers, general counsel, marketers, business development, social media and CRM specialists etc. The AI virtual assistants available via KIM technologies will no doubt impact (support and/or replace) many roles - lawyers, General Counsels and support staff. The role of human CRM and marketing professionals will shift too – for example, intelligent relationship agent, relationship manager, the big data guru, the data artist, the data steward and such – supporting individual lawyers in tracking a contact through an individual's entire life-cycle.

Powered by IBM Watson, DoNotPay has about 1,000 bots capable of tackling a variety of legal and service issues, ranging from fighting one's landlord to appealing against unreasonable warranties, to getting a refund when a company doesn't fulfill its promise. For example, typing in "medical bill" or "bank overcharges" triggered the extra help field, which lets users email the app's support staff with their problem. For example, typing in the words "parking dispute" from a San Francisco location triggered options to dispute a parking ticket in Los Angeles, San Francisco and two other California cities. In response to a "landlord dispute" search, DoNotPay served up options for fixing unrepaired property and retrieving an unreturned security deposit in California, along with parking dispute options for California.

It's used to train algorithms for things like sentiment analysis, predictive typing, automatic proofreading, and so on. In an analysis of 150 years of British periodicals, researchers were able to accurately detect changes in society: When electricity replaced steam; when trains replaced horses; epidemics; wars; and so on. Here's a chart of 50 jobs analyzed in the study, showing how strongly that job is associated with the female gender, and what the actual gender representation is: It makes technically good predictions that are morally bad. But at the same time, this gender bias is actually an accurate representation of the data; analyzing it over time, we could even predict a trendline of changes.

Within the next five to ten years, the onset of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to a revolution of the legal industry that will likely transform that model completely. It is widely acknowledged that AI will eventually change the legal industry, and automation will over time replace certain functions: lawyers will be able to perform their current tasks far more accurately and effectively. Indeed, if and when AI progresses to a very high level of intelligence, a large part of a lawyer's work will shift from providing legal advice to instead marketing: trying to retain clients and attract new ones and working closely with them to understand their needs. From a client perspective, if the work which lawyers currently carry out shifts towards spending more time working on their relationships with them -- including how to more efficiently and innovatively invoice them -- then, ultimately, that will lead to greater value for clients.

For example, many mid-sized and large companies already use AI in the hiring process to source candidates via technologies that search databases like LinkedIn. These sourcing methods typically use algorithms based on current staff and will, therefore, only identify people who look a lot like the current employees. As these AI sourcing methods become pervasive, HR and talent acquisition professionals wonder what this means for the industry and for their jobs. Where AI algorithms encourage sameness and disqualify huge swaths of potentially qualified candidates simply because they don't look like current employees, humans can identify the gaps in capabilities and personality and use that insight to promote more innovative hiring.

For example, many mid- to large-size companies use AI in hiring today to source candidates using technologies that search databases like LinkedIn. These sourcing methods typically use algorithms based on current staff and will, therefore, only identify people who look a lot like the current employees. As these AI sourcing methods become pervasive, HR and talent acquisition professionals wonder what this means for the industry and for their jobs. Where AI algorithms encourage sameness and disqualify huge swaths of potentially qualified candidates simply because they don't look like current employees, humans can identify the gaps in capabilities and personality and use that to promote more innovative hiring.

While the U.S. relaxes drone regulations, the U.K. government announced Saturday users will have to register their unmanned aircrafts and take safety awareness tests. Users will also be required to take a drone safety awareness test to prove they comprehend U.K. safety and privacy rules. The new rules come after a recent study said drones weighing 400 grams could damage windscreens of helicopters. "By registering drones, introducing safety awareness tests to educate users we can reduce the inadvertent breaching of airspace restrictions to protect the public," said Aviation Minister Martin Callanan in released statement.

"Several corporate legal departments, law firms, and service providers utilize AI for review and standardization of documents, for example. The purpose of these technologies isn't to do away with lawyers -- that would never be realistic -- but rather to make things easier on everyone involved. When things are easier, costs go down, clients get more attention, and attorneys enjoy more efficiency. As attorney Julie Sobowale says, "What will really make artificial intelligence a revolution is to change the thinking of lawyers.