Artificial intelligence could make lawyers more risk averse

IT HAS wormed its way into almost every sphere of life, and the law is no exception. Artificial intelligence can now handle a lot of the drudgery of legal work: sifting mountains of documents for relevant titbits, for example, or automatically drafting and checking boilerplate contracts. There's even a "superintelligent attorney" app, ROSS, powered by IBM's Watson supercomputer, that fields legal queries by speed-reading legislation and other resources. But what does it mean for the law when an algorithm, rather than a person, calls the shots? Frank Levy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dana Remus at the University of North Carolina School of Law have been on the case, exploring the potential ramifications of robotic legal assistants.