As someone who has built multiple AI-powered businesses in the legal community, I know firsthand the exciting potential of technology to transform the way we practice law. From predictive coding in electronic discovery, to AI-based contract analysis, legal tech has the power to make our jobs easier and more efficient. But with any new technology comes risk, uncertainty and responsibility. It's easy to get caught up in the hype of the latest buzzwords and trends, but when it comes to serving a demanding audience like lawyers and their clients, you better understand that there's a difference between'playtime' and'production.' What do I mean by that?

There has been a surge of interest in what generative AI can do. But what does this technology really mean for the legal sector? To find out we must navigate a path between'Death of the Lawyer 2.0' hysteria and those who dismiss the whole thing as a gimmick. Artificial Lawyer looks at what this tech can really do. Generative AI (gen AI), working via Large Language Models such as OpenAI's GPT-3, can do some amazing things.

The Annual Tech Survey of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) is being released, and the US-based organisation has very kindly allowed Artificial Lawyer to publish one of the more AI-related snapshots from its survey across 537 law firms. The key finding is that 54% of those who responded to this part of the survey said they were not pursuing some type of AI / machine learning option. And that is real progress. As seen in the table below, which ILTA has allowed to be shared today, the reality is that it's a clear minority of just 10% that have'one or more AI/ML tools in production'. WHAT IS YOUR FIRM'S CURRENT STRATEGY ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/MACHINE LEARNING (AI/ML)?

Today is Thanksgiving in the US, so first of all Happy Thanksgiving to all of Artificial Lawyer's readers in America! Second point, I was thinking about this important celebration in the US calendar and couldn't help but make some parallels (albeit highly tenuous ones…) with the growth of the legal AI sector. Although Thanksgiving as a celebration has evolved over the course of the last few hundred years, its core message seems to be about how a hearty band of people looking for a better world took a big risk and headed off to into a future that they had taken upon themselves to create. As anyone around the world who remembers the story will recollect, the Pilgrim Fathers, who set off from England in 1620, did not find it easy going. First, although they knew that the shores of where they were headed were already occupied by other people they went anyway – and to put it delicately, that caused a few issues for all involved.

Legal AI doc review company, Luminance, is branching out into the regulatory world in order to expand its offering by covering areas such as Brexit impact on contracts and GDPR compliance. The move follows a recent expansion into real estate documentation review, showing the company's initial strategy of focusing only on M&A due diligence is well and truly over, with a mission now to capture a greater share of the NLP-driven doc review market across different practice areas. In other news, the firm has also bagged top New Zealand law firm, Russell McVeagh, as its client base widens to 75 around the world, and operating in 23 countries, which is not bad considering the company only launched in September 2016. Luminance already works with Chapman Tripp, New Zealand's largest full-service commercial law firm. How much each of these firms uses their Luminance review system is currently unknown, but if market feedback is accurate then not all customers are making maximum use of the AI system they have signed up to – at least not yet.

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Adam Nguyen (pictured above), co-founder and COO of US legal AI company eBrevia, which in March announced that it had been chosen by Thomson Reuters (TR) to provide AI-driven document review for the global company's managed legal services clients. We discussed what the landmark deal means, how AI will be increasingly used in the legal world and where the company is heading. How significant is this both for TR and for eBrevia? This is an exciting time for TR and eBrevia. TR had carefully evaluated a number of AI-powered contract review softwares and selected eBrevia because we produced the most accurate results, not to mention the ease of tailoring eBrevia to specific industry needs.

Two major UK-based law firms, Allen & Overy (A&O) and Addleshaw Goddard (AG), have both announced new career paths to help them to adapt to legal tech's impact. Both initiatives are a clear indication of the growing importance of legal technology, in terms of showing the need for law firms to have the right skillsets internally and that legal tech capabilities have moved far beyond'operational' needs of just'keeping the lights on' and have now moved front and centre in terms of strategic growth planning for law firms. Machine learning/NLP tools are clearly part of this movement given that they can help in the direct production of legal work, such as via review, but legal tech's impact also includes a whole new wave of technology that connects to risk and compliance analysis, litigation prediction, contracting automation tools, smart contract and blockchain technology, and a range of incremental changes to more well-developed tech such as DMSs and collaboration platforms. In short, there is now so much new legal technology having an impact on how lawyers operate on a day to day basis and most importantly how they actually produce work that the more forward thinking firms are adapting their recruitment and career paths to meet these needs. This is all the more important when one considers that the clients are becoming increasingly savvy to the benefits of this'new means of production', leaving law firms that want to retain market position little option other than to adapt, while this market change is also offering early adopters the chance to compete more effectively against rivals in the legal market.

Tom Martin, the founder of legal bot maker, LawDroid, has been awarded a contract to build a voice-activated legal aid bot in the US in a major'real world' test of the technology and its access to justice (A2J) capabilities. Martin told Artificial Lawyer that it will be the first chat bot/legal bot funded by the Legal Services Corporation's Technology Initiative Grant Program. In this case, the bot will be used on the HELP4TN web portal created by the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services (TALS) in partnership with West Tennessee Legal Services. LawDroid beat out four other bot developers to win the mandate. The bot will operate off Martin's'Larissa' voice-activated bot platform, which Artificial Lawyer profiled last month.

It's been an incredible year for the'New Wave' of legal technology and Artificial Lawyer has hopefully been able to bring you some of the key moments in this evolutionary journey that is unfolding week by week all around the world. Now, as we head toward 2018, many of the leading players and commentators in the legal AI, legal bot and data analysis world have been asked to give their views on what has taken place and what will happen next. Plus, next year there will be predictions from the world of smart contracts and legal blockchain, (Hi, Clause, Integra Ledger and IBM's Cognitive Legal team, to name a few!) Artificial Lawyer asked an array of experts to name what was the biggest development for legal AI and the New Wave of legal technology this year, and what they expected to see happen in 2018. They were invited to respond with text or images to illustrate their views, and if they were up for it, a haiku or longer poem. Naturally, we couldn't fit everyone in – the legal tech world is just so massive now – but hopefully you'll find this collective wisdom both inspiring and thought-provoking – and fun – I know Artificial Lawyer did.

It's been an incredible year for the'New Wave' of legal technology and Artificial Lawyer has hopefully been able to bring you some of the key moments in this evolutionary journey that is unfolding week by week all around the world. Now, as we head toward 2018, many of the leading players and commentators in the legal AI, legal bot and data analysis world have been asked to give their views on what has taken place and what will happen next. Plus, next year there will be predictions from the world of smart contracts and legal blockchain, (Hi, Clause, Integra Ledger and IBM's Cognitive Legal team, to name a few!) Artificial Lawyer asked an array of experts to name what was the biggest development for legal AI and the New Wave of legal technology this year, and what they expected to see happen in 2018. They were invited to respond with text or images to illustrate their views, and if they were up for it, a haiku or longer poem. Naturally, we couldn't fit everyone in – the legal tech world is just so massive now – but hopefully you'll find this collective wisdom both inspiring and thought-provoking – and fun – I know Artificial Lawyer did. Biggest development of 2017: 'I think the most significant thing was how mainstream legal AI became – mass adoption by firms and NewLaw, and more focus on integrations, grown up security requirements, APIs and the like.' Biggest development of 2018: 'I think we're going to see more news about wider ML applicability, not just NLP/ML for litigation document review, contract review in diligence and in-house contract review (the primary use cases to date).