AI & Law: Legal Stockpiling

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually and inexorably entering into the legal profession. There is the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which we already experience in everyday ordinary interaction with Alexa and Siri and has been increasingly added into various LegalTech systems such as used for contract management, e-Discovery, and the like. Another avenue of AI consists of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. These computational pattern matching techniques are being used to predict court rulings and are also employed to ferret out prior relevant cases amongst a large-scale corpus of online court records. One of the most fascinating and likely law-disruptive AI technologies involves AI-based legal reasoning systems. The notion is that the AI simulates the legal argumentation precepts of human attorneys and essentially carries out a limited form of legal reasoning. Initially, these AI-based legal reasoners would be used as an aid for lawyers and jurists seeking to craft legal arguments. In this semi-autonomous mode, the AI works hand-in-hand with the human legal expert and they jointly establish a robust legal argument or legal posture. Some assert that this capability by the AI will inevitably be further advanced and we will have available fully autonomous AI-based legal reasoning systems that can act in lieu of needing any human legal guidance.