Artificial intelligence (AI) has gained enormous pace in the legal profession in recent years, as law firms throughout the world have recognised the potential value that AI can bring to their practises.
Law companies realise significant efficiencies that increase profitability while generating speedier client outcomes by employing innovative technology such as natural language processing, machine learning, and robotic process automation.
However, properly adopting an AI strategy necessitates a thorough understanding of both its potential applications and basic technological components—this article intends to assist you in unlocking that capability.
Improving the efficiency of legal research and analysis
AI can help law firms conduct more efficient and accurate legal research and analysis. Law experts can undertake deep-dive studies on a considerably bigger range of data using natural language processing (NLP) technologies, extracting knowledge much faster than traditional manual examination.
Machine learning utilities can consume vast amounts of documents and artefacts in several languages to generate automated correlations between legal cases or precedents, supporting lawyers in developing arguments or locating relevant facts for their clients' cases.
Improving case management and document automation
Intelligent AI-enabled automation approaches are ideal for document automation and case management tasks.
Legal teams could significantly improve the pace of generating documents such as wills, deeds, leases, loan agreements, and many more templates resembling commonly used legal forms by leveraging automated document assembly technologies driven by machine intelligence.
Automating these processes minimises wastage associated with errors while increased efficiency significantly shortens review times of drafts sent out for attorneys’ approval.
E-discovery and due diligence procedures optimisation
One of the many useful uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice is optimising e-discovery and due diligence processes. AI can automatically gather data, classify documents, and scale/index information for content analysis.
Additionally, clients typically demand quicker and less expensive e-discovery, and automated machine solutions make it simple to achieve both of these goals.
Lawyers can swiftly identify keywords or important details thanks to AI technology. As a result, they can determine the types of documents involved or linked to a case quicker than ever before, allowing the lawyers who employ this technology an advantage over those who stick with manual methods alone.
Challenges
Law companies can profit greatly from AI, but it's not magic, and they must use it responsibly because it's not a substitute for human judgement. There are some difficulties and factors to take into account while employing AI for law firms.
Ethical issues
While AI can increase efficiency for lawyers, it also poses ethical concerns that legal companies should think about, including the possibility of bias.
Since people are subject to prejudice and because AI relies on human-sourced data to produce its outputs and predictions, it has the potential to be biassed.
For example, if previous legal decisions were made with unfair bias and an AI tool uses machine learning to infer conclusions based on those decisions, the AI may unwittingly learn the same bias. With this in mind, it is critical for lawyers to examine potential prejudice while employing AI.
Data safety
It is a lawyer's responsibility to safeguard client information and confidential data, which implies that law firms must be cautious about the security of any prospective tools they employ. And, because most AI technologies rely on data to work, law firms must be extra cautious about what data they allow AI to access.
For example, you don't want to save your client's private information in a database that AI may access and use for someone else. With this in mind, law firms must thoroughly select AI vendors and guarantee that personal data is protected.
Education and training
Proper education and guidance are critical to ensuring that AI is used responsibly and ethically in legal firms. While not every lawyer needs to be an expert in artificial intelligence technology, understanding how AI technologies work is critical to assisting lawyers in using them responsibly and identifying any potential ethical or privacy concerns.
Lawyers can utilise their experience to determine how and when to apply AI technology in their practise by knowing how it works while vetting, installing, and using technologies.
