The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow SimpleLegal and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates! Corporate Counsel magazine reporters spoke to several general counsel about what they say will impact their work and the legal industry. From outside counsel merging with other law firms to the use of artificial intelligence to keep down legal department costs, this article outlines some of the trends in-house counsel may find themselves dealing with in the new year.

Lawyers have long been characterized as technology Luddites who are slow to change and wary of innovation. For corporate counsel, though, this stereotype may be fading. According to the results of a new Thomson Reuters report, "Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence and Corporate Legal Departments", corporate counsel believe they are tech savvy but acknowledge that their comfort level and confidence with technology have limitations, specifically around artificial intelligence (AI). The applications and impact of AI are growing, and AI tools will undoubtedly affect how the legal profession practices over the next decade. Consider how dramatically technology inventions have already changed the practice of law: From typewriters to computers and from fax machines to email, each advance has been transformative in the law.

Lawyers are the professionals everyone loves to loathe. Jokes about attorneys abound, and Shakespeare's line from Henry VI remains a cultural favorite: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Soon, that dream may come true, and machines will be the ones to do it. Academically trained attorneys are increasingly being replaced by technology to analyze evidence and assess it for relevance in investigations, lawsuits, compliance efforts, and more. Forty percent of more than 100 in-house attorneys in major American corporations told the industry publication Corporate Counsel, in a survey published on Jan. 23, that they rely on technology assisted review (TAR).

Artificial intelligence's (AI) entrance into any profession often features an odd mixture of ominous predictions from affected workers and executives extolling the virtues of'innovation,' 'change,' and whatever other flashy, vague adjectives apply to the situation. Yet between the hype and horror lies a more moderate, less sexy truth that proceeds on a slower trajectory than vocal pro-and-opponents would have you believe. The future has a way of creeping up on us, and the same can be said (unsurprisingly) for its movement into the legal industry. For while many were debating how much AI could really help legal tasks, let alone just what exactly AI actually is, technologists, vendors and lawyers with foresight were eagerly moving forward. And before we knew it, the adoption of AI-infused legal technology began its transition from the exception to the norm.

Since we released our text summarization resources, the legal technology community has shown interest in leveraging summarization technology to support litigation document review, deposition digests, and contract analysis. Data scientist interest to use machine learning to mine legal document corpuses and support legal strategy was also one factor motivating our summarization research. The time is therefore ripe for data scientists to apply new text analytics capabilities for legal use cases. But to be effective, data scientists must first understand how lawyers think: what problems they're trying to solve, how their processes are structured, and, perhaps most importantly, what fears may hinder the adoption of new technologies. This guest blog post from Dean Gonsowski, kCura's VP of Business Development, provides tips to help data scientists explain the value of machine learning to lawyers. Electronic discovery software helps manage the exchange of electronically stored information, documents that could be used as evidence in various forms of litigation like investigations or contract reviews.