The legal media has lately had a mania for tech headlines. Many commentators claim that tech, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will do something to Big Law. Tech more likely will do something in it: incremental change. I start with the case against disruption, then look at four headline-grabbing technologies: AI, Bots, Big Data, and Blockchain. By the late 1980s, a few law firms had most of their lawyers using PCs.

At both AALL and ILTA this past summer, I attended sessions where Brian Kuhn from IBM spoke about transforming the business of law using IBM's Watson offering. Brian offered a compelling vision of the future and when talking about Watson, while he did reference three use cases for Watson in the legal market, I did find it curious how much emphasis was devoted to Watson's success in the medical field. Given the degree of hype currently surrounding AI in the legal markets, I thought it relevant to examine this in a bit more detail. Despite the high degree of irrational exuberance (to paraphrase Alan Greenspan and Robert Shiller) around artificial intelligence, the reality is that applying AI to complex problems is, at best, a nuanced proposition and one that typically entails more investment than one may think. One highly publicized example can be found in IBM's agreement with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the "structural collapse" of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged. Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with "peak humanity" occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people. This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called "geriatric-tech" related IP. The report's focus on the future of work contained the most disturbing findings for lawyers. Its main proposition is that AI is already close in 2014. "It is no longer unrealistic to consider that workplace robots and their AI processing systems could reach the point of general production by 2030… after long incubation and experimentation, technology can suddenly race ahead at astonishing speed."

Artificial Lawyer spent 12 happy hours at the Legal Geek Conference on Brick Lane in East London yesterday and can confirm to those who might be wondering, that yes, this was the best legal tech event of the year. The success of the event was very much driven by an entrepreneur himself, Jimmy Vestbirk, who created Legal Geek and set the tone from the get-go, with a great Truman Brewery space for the event and mandatory high fives to the attendees sitting on either side. There was also a no ties policy and that deserves a special commendation. What set this event apart from others was that the speakers were the real thing. They were the founders and/or senior staff members of the legal AI companies everyone else is talking about.

PRNewswire has reported on RAVN Systems, leading experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Search and Knowledge Management solutions, and Fireman & Company, the leading management consulting firm for law firms and corporate legal departments, announcing a strategic partnership to deliver revolutionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) and enterprise search technology to the North American legal market. This strategic partnership will provide law firms and corporate legal departments with the most advanced AI search platform on the market. Peter Wallqvist, CEO at RAVN Systems commented, "We are excited to collaborate with Joshua Fireman and his team and align our collective focus of transforming legal services through innovation. RAVN's search technology will provide firms and corporate clients with a radically enhanced Universal Search and Knowledge Management tool that exploits Artificial Intelligence to efficiently capture, find, manage and collaborate on their organisations' information estate. The technology's advanced features include Expertise Location, Clause Extraction and a Knowledge Graph to navigate links between knowledge types across the enterprise."

The legal media has lately had a mania for tech headlines. Many commentators claim that tech, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will do something to Big Law. Tech more likely will do something in it: incremental change. I start with the case against disruption, then look at four headline-grabbing technologies: AI, Bots, Big Data, and Blockchain. By the late 1980s, a few law firms had most of their lawyers using PCs.

Editor's Note: The author of this post is a legal technology and management consultant. The legal media has lately had a mania for tech headlines. Many commentators claim that tech, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will do something to Big Law. Tech more likely will do something in it: incremental change. I start with the case against disruption, then look at four headline-grabbing technologies: AI, Bots, Big Data, and Blockchain.

I saw the future of the legal industry in a warehouse in Shoreditch. That perhaps sounds like an unusual thing to say about a 700 billion global market, but after visiting a legal tech company yesterday in London's most dynamic quarter the true scale of what could happen to the legal sector was laid bare. What I saw is not the end for all lawyers, but instead an AI whirlwind hitting the current world of paralegals and junior associates, whose working lives may very well be about to turn upside down. Such a change will, or at least could, shake the economic model of law firms that has existed for decades to its very foundations. And by that I mean the end of large-scale leverage, i.e. the practice of using several junior lawyers to every equity partner and through which some law firms have been able to become incredibly profitable.

Why do you think technologies such as AI and predictive coding are apparently gaining momentum in term of their uptake in the UK legal market? First and foremost, the legal market isn't an isolated bubble. There is so much happening right now in the world at large about AI and cognitive computing that the legal market simply can't be immune. Our behaviours in the workplace are driven (and increasingly so) by our experiences in the rest of our lives, so when there's a constant stream of mainstream news about AI, it's inevitable that it must impact the legal market. Add into the mix a number of other legal market factors – the increasing price sensitivity of clients, the explosion in data, the long-standing feeling that there must be a better way to do repetitive knowledge tasks than simply adding more junior lawyers – and you've got the perfect conditions for these technologies to take hold.