Cease and Desist Letter Automation Introduction: On Friday, April 20th LegalRnD will host the "Measuring Lawyer Quality and Setting an Empirical Research Agenda for Legal Technology and Innovation" Conference from 9 am to 12 pm at the Kellogg Center in East Lansing. Students from Dan Linna Jr.'s Litigation: Data, Theory, Practice, Process Course will present on legal technology tools that have been developed to address real-world problems Students were taught the Kata method to help identify potential solutions for the legal problems that they were provided. Students were also trained in both Think Smart and Neota Logic artificial intelligence platforms, so that these solutions could be built for the project partner. My group consisted of Erica Porter, Kaitlyn Huber and myself. We were given the following problem by Jeffrey Sharer of the Akerman Law Firm .

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and why you set up Artificial Lawyer? About 10 years ago, I started working at a large US consultancy as a strategy consultant to law firms. I then worked for a smaller boutique consultancy in the City of London. Two years ago, I set up my own business, Tromans Consulting, and I've been advising law firms on strategy and business decisions since. It became quite clear to me about 18 months ago that AI was going to have a profound impact as it evolves and spreads through the market, and I needed to take this into account when advising my clients.

According to Kreutzer, "It's only AI when you don't know how it works; once it works, it's just software." Why did Liberty Mutual even consider using AI? As a life long geek, Jeff thought that AI was a cool thing to explore. The purpose of this exploration was to try to reduce some of the cognitive load, some of the lower-value tasks that slow the legal department's lawyers down. Ultimately, it was intended to allow the lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks. With all the hype about AI, it is easy to be dazzled by the "pixie dust" aspects of the technology.

Using Neota Logic's unique artificial intelligence platform, the Clifford Chance application allows firms to filter thousands of pages of regulation and legislation by their business type, clients and products, streamlining the review process and providing draft clauses for adoption in their documentation. The toolkit is being offered to Clifford Chance clients for a fixed up-front fee, allowing firms to access complex legal advice at a fraction of the price of individual analysis. "Given the vast scale of these reforms, a full analysis of the new regulations would be a serious undertaking, and a costly exercise for any financial institution" said Monica Sah, Financial Regulatory partner at Clifford Chance. "By embracing artificial intelligence, we've managed to develop a tool that gives our clients just what they need, right when they need it, at a much reduced cost. "Whether firms are at the beginning of their MiFID journey, or need a way of benchmarking their existing provisions, we're confident that this tool will provide real value to a range of our clients, from global investment banks to boutique asset managers." Following on from an over-the-counter derivatives documentation tool in 2016, the MiFID toolkit marks the second application that Clifford Chance has developed with Neota Logic, and is just one part of a firm-wide strategy to innovate the ways that it delivers advice to clients. "Handing over reams of technical information is blunt and outdated", continues Monica Sah. "By working with technology providers like Neota, we are able to package our advice into powerful products that save time, money, and enable our clients to deploy that information in a smart way throughout their organisation.

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.

The other day, a search for "artificial intelligence in law" produced 86,400 results from just the News section of Google's vast index. From the Web as a whole, 32,800,000 results and from Videos – 261,000, beginning with Jude Law's role as Gigolo Joe in the movie A.I. (thank you, RankBrain). The first News story was "Law firm bosses envision Watson-type computers replacing young lawyers," reporting on the answers to one question in the recent Altman & Weil survey of law firm leaders (page 82). As wittily argued by Ryan McClead, "the question is flawed on many levels [and] … it's time to cut the hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence in law." But we need to parse the pile a bit.

The recent media frenzy about artificial intelligence (AI) has been unavoidable. This vision has perhaps come a step closer with the arrival of IBM Watsoni and Richard Susskind's latest book, The Future of the Professionsii, which predicts an internet society with greater virtual interaction with professional services such as doctors, teachers, accountants, architects and lawyers. In reality, is AI many years away from making any real impact in the legal sector? And should law firms see this technical advancement as an opportunity or threat? Broadly speaking, AI is the theory and development of computer systems which will perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.