Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? Companies have long sought technologies that promise an advantage in fighting litigation. For most enterprises, casework is a major drain on resources. In 2020, U.S. businesses spent a total of $22.8 billion dollars on litigation; law firm Fulbright & Jaworski estimated in 2005 that nearly 90% of businesses are engaged in some type of litigation and that the average company balances a docket of 37 lawsuits. With the democratization of AI and analytics tools, it was perhaps inevitable that startups would begin applying predictive techniques to the legal field -- particularly given the enormous market opportunity.

GPT-1 was released on June 11, 2018. When this model was released by OpenAI, there was much excitement. It was the transformer structure combined with unsupervised pre-training with promising results. The key difference between GPT-1 and the other language-based models before it, is that it was fine-tuned, or trained for specific tasks. GPT-2 was introduced in February 2019.

Lawyers were trained to think that practicing law is a zero-sum game, with no space for collaboration. Some recent events gave me hope that this is no longer the case. I know I am biased, because in the past I've been an open innovation manager in a global corporation, but even now that I'm working on legal technology adoption for a big law firm I think we might have a good chance. I recently attended a working breakfast in Milan (Italy), organized by Luminance, a leading contract review company, which was the first in a sequence of similar events. On that occasion, several partners and innovation heads from big Italian law firms openly discussed ideas and best practices on the matter.

It's no secret that the legal field is a competitive environment. Junior lawyers are undeterred by (and perhaps even attracted to) the cutthroat nature of the business, and one-upping the competitor is necessary to get a job in the legal field. Firms turn to the latest and greatest tech development to compete with each other and "keep up with the [legal] Joneses." In 2019 alone, investments in B2B legal tech soared past $1 billion. Still, some legal professionals fear that cutting-edge technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), will eliminate the role of junior lawyers in the future. It's clear to many, however, that law firms must incorporate new legal tech developments in order to attract top talent, remain a top competitor, and mold their junior lawyers to be better than the next.

Being such an immensely powerful sector, the legal field is definitely not exempt from the power of technology now paving its way steadily across all its areas. The advancement of technology in the law field has definitely led to an evolution in the operations of the legal professionals. As legal operations become increasingly automated, this has propelled legal professionals such as lawyers and paralegals to acquire proficiency in operations such as word processing, telecommunications, presenting data, and so on. Law technology has touched every part of the legal field, be it law firms and corporate practices to courtroom operations and handling of documents. Advancing technologies like artificial intelligence enable modern software to go through legal documents, simplify communications as well as discover suitable casework for law professionals.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is changing the landscape of the practice of law. From e-Discovery to A.I. contract software, A.I. is impacting legal practices. A.I. is now capable of a more involved role in litigation, such as: Some law firms have been slow to adapt to the advantages that A.I. brings. The fear that they are replacing the work of attorneys is unfounded. A.I. helps reduce the amount of tedious and redundant work once done by those in the legal field.

Artificial intelligence programs are being used in more applications and more industries all the time. The legal field is an area that could substantially benefit from AI programs, due to the massive amount of documents that have to be reviewed for any given case. As reported by the Observer, one company is aiming to bring AI to the legal fields, with its CEO seeing a wide variety of uses for AI. Lane Lillquist is the co-founder and CTO of InCloudCounsel, a legal tech firm. Lillquist believes that AI can be used to help lawyers be more efficient and accurate in their jobs.

We're certainly not going to run out of potential applications for artificial intelligence in the legal field any time soon, particularly as developments in AI enable us to apply it to more sophisticated aspects of lawyers' work.It's not just new entrants that are responding to demand from innovators in the legal field. Current, well-known providers of legal tech are also venturing into AI-powered products, either through acquisition or developing their own tools. This is a sign that the industry is changing and companies that have traditionally provided services to lawyers are moving to meet this new demand.

The First International Workshop on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA) will be held at the Cyberjustice Laboratory at the University of Montreal on June 17th. This workshop is part of the 17th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL), a biennial conference which has served as an important forum at the intersection the AI and the law since its founding in 1987. The LegalAIIA workshop itself is an offshoot of the successful decade-long DESI (Discovery for Electronically Stored Informed) workshop series, which was pivotal in helping forge an interdisciplinary community of legal and technical practitioners working on advancing the state-of-the-art in electronic discovery practice. The first edition of Legal AIIA, driven by an impressive set of electronic discovery veterans including Jack G. Conrad (Thomson Reuters), Jeremy Pickens (Catalyst Repository Systems), Amanda Jones (H5), Hans Henseler (Magnet Forensics), and Jason R. Baron (Drinker, Biddle & Reath), aims to tackle head on the issue of human-AI collaboration. Accepted papers will focus on evaluating when and how to best leverage a "human-in-the-loop" approach to AI.

Artificial intelligence has moved into the world of corporate legal matters: A Tokyo-based start-up founded by young lawyers is using AI to check for omissions and mistakes in contracts, sometimes taking only one second. There have been calls lately for greater legal compliance, and the service is drawing attention over whether it can help streamline corporate legal practices. LegalForce Inc. was established in April last year, and is led by 31-year-old lawyer Nozomu Tsunoda, who quit a leading law firm to go into business for himself. Even with only seven employees, LegalForce checks contract documents such as a confidentiality agreement between companies. The service uses AI to automatically check such things as provisions or phrasing that could be detrimental to a company, as well as omissions or incomplete elements.