Legal tech gurus forecast how AI will impact your practice

There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of the law practice. One faction believes that robots and all AI are going to render lawyers largely redundant or drastically reduce their numbers. On the other side are those who say artificial intelligence is vastly overblown, that it's just a fad and that it will not have that big of an impact on the legal industry. Attorney Mark A. Cohen, a leading authority on the delivery of legal services and an early adoptee of technology in the legal industry, comes down somewhere in the middle. "I say AI is not going to replace lawyers but instead cause lawyers to work differently in the marketplace than they have before,'' he explained during a panel discussion on the ABA-sponsored webinar "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Law Practice." Cohen was joined on the panel by Noory Bechor, Anna Ronkainen and Nicole Black. Sharon D. Nelson served as program moderator. While law firms are slow to embrace this new technology, AI is already having an impact on firms in the U.S. and around the world. Robots or machines are being utilized to do tedious, time-consuming tasks like collecting data, searching records, going through old cases, verifying facts, etc.-- work currently done by junior lawyers and paralegals. Remember the IBM computer Watson, which debuted on the TV game show Jeopardy some years back? That was AI in its purest form, said Cohen. Well, Watson spun off a son called ROSS, which a number of law firms now employ, including Baker & Hostetler, Lathan & Watkins, Dentons, K&L Gates, Bryan Cave and Womble Carlyle. "Robots are doing some of these repetitive, mundane tasks," said Cohen, founder & CEO of Legal Mosaic LLC in Washington, D.C. "This does not mean that those lawyers who were doing those tasks are going to be out of a job, but they are going to be liberated to do other types of things." Nelson, an attorney and president of the digital forensics, information technology and information security firm Sensei Enterprises, Inc., in Fairfax, Va., disagreed somewhat with Cohen on jobs not being lost. She pointed to a December 2016 report by Accenture, which said 5 percent of its workforce (20,000 full-time jobs) is no longer human. "Accenture is not a law firm but it provides high-level consulting, technology services and strategic planning for more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500 companies,'' Nelson said.