Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Law

From driverless cars to Amazon's Alexa, artificial intelligence is growing at a phenomenal speed and is set to disrupt the corporate legal landscape through mining documents, creating contracts and performing due diligence. In a legal landscape defined by change, uncertainty, and an increasingly complex market, these developments will change the calculus of how business is conducted, alter solicitor-client relationships and engender new legal challenges which will, in turn, demand new solutions. Technological advancement is changing the face of business by translating into new demands and new market pressures in the context of unfamiliar market behaviours. For instance, blockchain raises countless implications about the very nature of transactions and contract formation; due to its ability to produce outputs autonomously, once a transaction is set in motion the contract's performance is taken out of the hands of the contracting parties, decreasing the extent of trust and due diligence required and making the contract immutable and cryptographically secure. In such a world, where contracts are executed by machines and written in computer code by software engineers, a myriad of potential benefits relating to speed, certainty and transparency arise, paired, however, with a corresponding array of risks related to error and the potential of hacking.