IBM Watson might transform, but will it fix the law itself?

It happened recently as I was looking at demonstrations of two very interesting new technology-based companies that help automate due diligence processes. They are both classic examples of the type of technological innovation that's happening at lightning speed in the legal industry today. They are addressing an enormous pain point in the industry: the mind-numbing burden of manually reviewing thousands of contracts as part of a due diligence mandate. It's the kind of work that has provided a good living for generations of young law firm associates, but it is not efficient and, being human-based, not always very accurate. These two new companies are using technology to make that review more efficient and accurate, by analyzing, summarizing, and extracting structured data from big masses of unstructured and wildly inconsistent documents. To the extent the technology works, it's because it imposes some kind of order on the non-standard work of human lawyers.