Building on a pilot partnership with an artificial intelligence company it launched last year, Baker McKenzie is upping its bet that machine learning and data-driven analytics will benefit the firm and its clients. Baker McKenzie, which first teamed up with AI-powered platform SparkBeyond in October, is now entering into a three-year exclusive contract with the company and building a new 11-person team within the firm to leverage the technology for internal and client-facing projects, the global firm said Monday. The firm plans to hire two co-founders to build out and lead the new team alongside London-based partner Ben Allgrove, who is Baker McKenzie's global head of research and development. The firm said candidates for the roles - which are now open for applications - should be "steeped in legal innovation." "Five years ago our industry was flooded with hype about AI disruption," Allgrove said in a statement.

For any client-facing business, the front-runners of the future will be those who can adapt to the changing needs of clients. This fact is now starting to sink in for the legal sector, who have been slow in embracing transformative technologies up until now. Indeed, some have commented that the working practices of many in the industry have changed little since the time of Charles Dickens. In their 2017 report on the sector, PwC claim that clients have long been frustrated with the rising cost and speed of legal service delivery and many have responded by taking more work in-house, by bringing individual lawyers in through'lawyer on demand' providers. Many believe that the time is ripe and that the "2020s will be the decade of disruption" as law firms increase investment in technology to automate tasks and improve decision making.

Lawyers are using artificial intelligence tools for automating tasks, such as contract review and sorting through electronic discovery documents, according to the article. But higher level tasks, especially those that require experience, will take a while, lawyers and other experts told the newspaper. Professor Dana Remus of the University of North Carolina School of Law and labor economist Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper on the automation of legal work in 2016 and concluded that although the automation of legal tasks reduces the amount of work lawyers must do, it's not enough to put lawyers out of business. Their paper said that if large law firms adopt new legal technology immediately, those lawyers would lose 13 percent of their current work hours. But the authors said it's more realistic to assume that this would happen over five years, which would result in closer to a 2.5 percent reduction in hours per year. Furthermore, the authors said, large law firms already have largely automated or outsourced document review, and lawyers at those firms now spend only about 4 percent of their time on that task.

Lawyers are using artificial intelligence tools for automating tasks, such as contract review and sorting through electronic discovery documents, according to the article. But higher level tasks, especially those that require experience, will take a while, lawyers and other experts told the newspaper. Professor Dana Remus of the University of North Carolina School of Law and labor economist Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper on the automation of legal work in 2016 and concluded that although the automation of legal tasks reduces the amount of work lawyers must do, it's not enough to put lawyers out of business. Their paper said that if large law firms adopt new legal technology immediately, those lawyers would lose 13 percent of their current work hours. But the authors said it's more realistic to assume that this would happen over five years, which would result in closer to a 2.5 percent reduction in hours per year.