Software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) already carries out multiple legal tasks today. In the future, AI will affect and own even more of these tasks. While consumer facing AI is rapidly evolving, AI in legal is still in its early days. Autonomous legal departments and law firms are still far away. Today, AI can conduct research, review documents, expedite digital discovery, aid due diligence and more, but it cannot replace advocacy or negotiation or appear in court.

If you just read the sensational headlines (like the clickbait above), you might get the impression that robots and automation will leave junior associates out of work – like work horses put to pasture by the combustion engine and the industrial revolution. Images come to mind of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, like Terminator or Blade Runner, where artificial intelligence has its grip on humanity as we struggle to survive. But, after surviving the COVID pandemic, reasonable minds are beginning to question if there's more to the story. No less reputable research firms than Gartner and Delloite predict the demise of low-level legal work. Their research states, 22 percent of a lawyer's job and 35 percent of a law clerk's job can be automated, which means that while humanity won't be completely overtaken, major businesses and career adjustments aren't far off (see "Is Technology About to Decimate White-Collar Work?").

For attorneys, "discovery" is the critical, information gathering phase of a case. A time that's spent collecting and reviewing evidence that will eventually become the building blocks for future arguments. In times of yore, this process was primarily physical--it involved gathering actual documents, pouring over paper and ink photos, interviewing real live witnesses, and combing through objects archived in evidence storage lockers. These days, however, building a case isn't so much about reviewing what you can see, taste, feel, and smell, as it is about what you can't. It's about combing through huge amounts of unstructured material that only exist as 0s and 1s inside a database somewhere.

Companies regularly spend millions of dollars producing electronically-stored documents in legal matters. Recently, parties on both sides of the 'legal aisle' are accepting the use of machine learning techniques like text classification to cull massive volumes of data and to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. While text classification is regularly used to reduce the discovery costs in legal matters, it also faces a peculiar perception challenge: amongst lawyers, this technology is sometimes looked upon as a "black box", little information provided for attorneys to understand why documents are classified as responsive. In recent years, a group of AI and ML researchers have been actively researching Explainable AI, in which actions or decisions are human understandable. In legal document review scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, if one or more of its text snippets are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if text classification can be used to locate these snippets, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's classification decision. When deployed with defined and explainable results, text classification can drastically enhance overall quality and speed of the review process by reducing the review time. Moreover, explainable predictive coding provides lawyers with greater confidence in the results of that supervised learning task. This paper describes a framework for explainable text classification as a valuable tool in legal services: for enhancing the quality and efficiency of legal document review and for assisting in locating responsive snippets within responsive documents. This framework has been implemented in our legal analytics product, which has been used in hundreds of legal matters. We also report our experimental results using the data from an actual legal matter that used this type of document review.

Compliance is a must-do activity, not a nice-to-have. It is essential that companies extract maximum value from compliance processes, reducing the possibility of it being considered a cost centre. Technological innovation can help to lift some of the compliance burden. The level of technology you can realistically implement depends on how advanced the organisation is to start with. One company's moonshot could be another's business as usual.

The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), Luxembourg's financial watchdog, has launched a three-year pilot project with the University of Luxembourg to streamline the review of retail funds information and give immediate feedback to the industry. Led by the Center for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), the project uses artificial intelligence to extract data from documents submitted to the CSSF by fund managers and then verifies their regulatory compliance. "This is a big step towards achieving close to real-time supervision" Claude Marx, managing director of the CSSF, said. Agreeing on the final version of a document can takes month in the current, manual set up. "It can be shortened to just a couple of hours when done by artificial intelligence," Björn Ottersten, director of SnT said In the first phase of the roll-out, the CSSF will apply the technology to retail funds, as 95% of the information in the prospectuses is standardised, hence easier to process. If the project is successful, the regulator will extend it to alternative funds.

A prominent Chinese venture capitalist, Kai-Fu Lee, has been proselytizing for the advancement of artificial intelligence for some time. He is the chief executive of an influential investment firm called Sinovation Ventures based in Beijing that specializes in artificial intelligence, also known as AI, and as such he has an interest in promoting the idea that it will change our world. However, he may end up scaring us more than astonishing us. You see, Lee now claims that up to 40 percent of jobs will be "displaceable" because of AI within 15 to 25 years. This past weekend, Lee appeared on a well-known American news television show to discuss AI, whereupon he stunned the reporter with his claim.

Venio Systems, the fastest growing eDiscovery technology provider, is excited to announce the availability of VenioOne Continuous Active Learning (CAL) in its latest release of VenioOne. After months of testing and incorporating feedback from our partners, as well as a hands on workshop for clients and partners held during ILTACON, VenioOne CAL is ready! VenioOne CAL is available to be added in the VenioOne platform for a one-time annual fee with no additional per document or gigabyte charges. While traditional technology assisted review (TAR) has been around for at least a decade, CAL, or TAR 2.0 as it is sometimes called, has only been around for the last several years and gotten serious attention in the last couple. At a time when the legal community is focused on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) in the practice of law, the time for CAL to boost the speed of document reviews has finally arrived.

LONG hours have been the bane of the legal profession for ages; few of them involve thrilling courtroom antics. As a junior corporate lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a law firm in New York, John Bick remembers spending most of his waking hours poring over contracts looking for clauses that could complicate or kill off a deal. Even once he became a partner he still had to pitch in on due diligence for large transactions. In 2015 nearly a third of British lawyers were looking to leave the profession, according to the job searches of more than 1,000 of them by Life Productions, a career-change consultancy, perhaps because of the drudgery. Such dissatisfaction may recede in future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the business of law. Many firms are adopting the rapidly expanding suite of AI-powered tools to help their legal practitioners improve client relationships and deliver better outcomes. The burgeoning legal tech industry is putting an ever-expanding suite of AI-powered tools in the hands of law firms. Most tools are currently focused on lifting the burden of document review, analysis and research off your shoulders. Like all legal tech solutions, the goal of AI-powered tools is to offer lawyers new ways to facilitate the just, quick and cheap resolution of disputes and respond more appropriately to client needs.