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An In-House Lawyer's Interesting Compliment For Cravath

When it comes to quality control, Cravath remains the gold standard.

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Cravath does a pretty good job, in my experience. You talk to one Cravath lawyer, you’ve talked to them all.

— Scott Ferrauiola, associate general counsel at IBM, speaking yesterday at the Thomson Reuters Law Firm Leaders Forum here in New York.

(A few more fun comments from Ferrauiola, who describes himself as “Watson’s lawyer,” after the jump.)

In case you’re not familiar with it, Watson is, as IBM puts it, “a cognitive technology that processes information more like a human than a computer — by understanding natural language, generating hypotheses based on evidence, and learning as it goes.” As we’ve discussed before in these pages, Watson and technologies like it are transforming, and will continue to transform, the practice of law.

Some might dismiss computers and technology as limited, mechanistic, and capable of performing only rote, low-value tasks. According to Ferrauiola, however, Watson can be “taught” to perform sophisticated tasks. Watson comes unbiased, but “you can give it a bias. You can train it to be a Cravath M&A lawyer. You can make it your own.”

Will Watson and other forms of artificial intelligence take away all the lawyer jobs? Or will they improve the training of lawyers and make it easier and more enjoyable to practice law?

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Only time will tell. These are questions that not even Watson can answer.

Disclosure: I own stock in IBM — which hasn’t been very fun lately — and I’m also exposed to IBM through an S&P 500 index fund.

Law Firm Leaders Forum [Thomson Reuters]

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