9/3/2019 Will AI replace lawyers?

Assessing the potential of artificial intelligence in legal services

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Will AI replace lawyers? Assessing the

potential of arti cial intelligence in
legal services
venkat k
Sep 3 · 4 min read

In May 1997, in a high-level chess match under tournament conditions, world champion
Gary Kasparov took on IBM’s Deep Blue, developed by IBM. This is the first time
defeating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) world champion. The result garnered a lot of
coverage at the time and marks the triumph of late 20th-century technology.
The question of whether the practice of law demonstrates the same strategic competence
as a chess match does not need to be answered here, and certainly not as a practicing
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9/3/2019 Will AI replace lawyers? Assessing the potential of artificial intelligence in legal services

lawyer. Progress in AI, in many aspects of life since the turn of the century, is undeniable.
And the legal profession, although often regarded as resistant to change, is no exception.
In what could be considered a similar deep blue moment, a US study conducted in 2018
put 20 respected corporate lawyers against AI in error detection testing across non-
disclosure agreements (NDAs). Responses were measured with time and accuracy.
Human lawyers achieve an average accuracy rate of 85% over a period of 92 minutes. By
comparison, the success rate of AI was measured at 92% — an impressive score,
especially when it was achieved in just 26 seconds. It is perhaps too early to suggest that
this is symbolic of the imminent end of human lawyers. But this raises some very
interesting questions. Can lawyers — or indeed any professional advisers and service
providers — eventually change? If so, how, where, and to what extent? The importance
of the “New Law” — often a group of international freelance attorneys, all operating
under one generic “firm” brand, but without expensive overheads such as office rentals
— has made 21st-century innovation success in many countries.
Advanced AI helps lawyers and judges to dig up historical antecedents much faster and
more efficiently than human lawyers.
As modern accountancy firms do not only audit the company, modern successful law
firms offer a variety of subject areas such as corporate, commercial, banking,
employment, real estate, and litigation. , which are tailored to specific business sectors.
Issue-spotting in an NDA is completely different from the strategic strategies involved in
a complex litigation case or the cross-table negotiation of any deal. Such expertise stems
from skills learned through practice.
Where can AI help?
In all disciplines, it is easy to see where general advances in AI can help the entire
profession. For example, all attorneys are required before on boarding a new client to
verify the client’s identity. So, for non-corporate clients, the advancement of facial
recognition technology saves the need to collect duplicate documents at the beginning of
any new instruction.
Courts and the legal system are a clear area where advanced AI helps lawyers and judges
in mining historical wealth more quickly and efficiently than human lawyers and
researchers do. Probably for the smallest of things, completely online courts are not that
far off.
Incorporate transactions, it is a common practice for junior lawyers to travel to online
databases and spend hours filing company documents, contracts and other information
with due care. Speed-reading for issue-spotting based on specific words and phrases in
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9/3/2019 Will AI replace lawyers? Assessing the potential of artificial intelligence in legal services

physical contracts, as the US study cited above, achieves both the advantages of speed
efficiency and reducing human error. If AI is nothing more than reviewing dozens of
trade deals, you are less likely to feel bored or tired.
All of these examples should speed up processes and save time and costs for clients. But
the output of any AI system relies heavily on its algorithms and data input — for which
human interaction is still required. Should IT professionals develop legal AI rather than
legal experts? Who will bear the ultimate accountability if the AI makes a clear or not-so-
obvious error?
Potential pitfalls:
Lack of bias and accountability are two areas of obvious concern, especially if they use of
AI is involved in decision making rather than administrative processing. If an AI helps
judges reach the appropriate sentence based on judgments or principles, the data feeds
that underlie AI’s operational algorithms have some subjectivity. To reduce or eliminate
it altogether — after all, what is the use of the AI system that is so often and clearly
flawed than its human equality? — Requires significant time, cost and expense. Who
pays for this? Even in the case of controversial transactions, online programs already
allow individuals to skip attorneys altogether, in the small case of allowing clients to
make their own will or claim online refunds.

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