Canada, Technology

The View From Up North: Will ROSS App Make Life Better For Lawyers?

Practitioners are anxious and waiting to see if this new technology will result in cutting out lawyers and putting them out of business.

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One of Shakespeare’s most famous quotes comes from Henry the Sixth. A character named Dick says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Much has been made of this statement. Dick’s words are often quoted when scorning lawyers. Others interpret Dick’s words as backhanded praise for the profession. Essentially he is saying if you want to take over a country, first you have to kill all the lawyers — presumably the guardians of rule of law. No matter how you interpret it, one thing is clear: Dick wants to kills us all off.

As we enter 2015, the profession is in great flux. Technology and outsourcing have changed the rules of the game. Lawyers everywhere are struggling to figure out how to provide value to their clients and still make a decent buck. In some cases, lawyers are being cut out completely. We have a DIY culture. Why go to an estates lawyer, when you can draft your own will using off-the-shelf software? Why spend eight hundred bucks an hour to have a lawyer draft a complex agreement when you can find one online and “customize it” yourself?

The survival of the legal profession is at stake. Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but is it unreasonable to think in 20 years the number of Canadian lawyers may shrink considerably as technology replaces many of our functions? Everything that a non-lawyer can do for cheaper will go to the lowest dollar, making it harder for lawyers to stay in business. It’s already happening.

And now, here’s more flux. Let me introduce you to ROSS. It’s a very cool application being developed by a group of University of Toronto students, with some help from a future lawyer, Andrew Arruda. What is ROSS, you ask? It’s a program that allows users to ask legal questions in plain language and get answers.

ROSS is built on the back of IBM’s Watson platform. Watson is a cognitive program that “thinks” like a human. Humans have incredible ability to observe, learn, contextualize, and sort through data to reach conclusions. What we don’t have is the ability to plow through billions of pieces of data instantaneously.

Computers, on the other hand, can churn through reams of data, but search algorithms, for the most part, are unsophisticated and require the searcher to tease something mildly useful out of the results.

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Watson is being touted as the best of both worlds — a human approach to answering questions, coupled with the ability to search a universe full of data in an instant. The co-founders of ROSS have built a working application that can answer sophisticated legal questions using Watson’s cognitive approach. The application is aimed at practitioners. The goal is to make it quicker and cheaper to do research. The application is still being groomed for public use, but once the application is launched, practitioners will be able to log onto ROSS and ask it a plain language question like, “Are directors liable for a company’s failure to pay employee income tax?”

ROSS, through the magic of Watson, will attack the question in much the same manner as a human lawyer and then use that approach to cull through a vast body of legal data. It would then return its most confident answer, which might be a piece of legislation or a case. It will also provide four selected readings that should be helpful.

Thus, it doesn’t actually “answer” the question, but rather it gives you a much more refined starting spot. Thinking back to my early days in practice when I conducted legal research (poorly), I remember how often I spun my wheels. I would spend hours considering a question from one direction, only to realize it was the wrong direction. Then I would re-think my approach and spend another several hours digging through cases and texts before I came to the conclusion that I had taken another wrong turn. I would eventually stumble upon the correct approach and come to a reasonable answer. But not until I had, in many instances, wasted a bunch of my client’s money.

That to me seems to be the real value of ROSS. It costs you almost nothing to be wrong. Ask your question and review the results. It should be quickly apparently whether you’re asking a fruitful question or not. If not, ask another question. And another question. And another question. Eventually you will hit something relevant. Plus, if ROSS is doing its job correctly, it will hand you the most pertinent materials to review without having to conduct another search — that’s a big time saver.

Oh, what I would’ve given to have ROSS early in my career. It would have made my life so much simpler and allowed me more time to freak out over why I wasn’t billing enough hours. You can also see how ROSS has the potential to help small firms replicate the horsepower of big firms, making smaller firms more competitive with their Biglaw peers.

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We must always look at the bigger picture, however. Although très intéressant, will ROSS ultimately make life better or worse for lawyers overall? By better, I mean will it allow lawyers to protect their domain, charge huge billing rates and horde legal work? Or will it eventually fall into the general public’s hands and make it easier for people to answer their own legal questions, cutting out lawyers, putting lawyers out of business, and forcing them to re-educate as podiatrists?

Andrew Arruda says the goal is to launch ROSS for widespread use sometime in the next year or so. It may take many years to know its ultimate impact.

I will say this in plain language to ROSS. I think you’re very cool. I think you’re cutting edge. I’m very attracted to you. I wish I had you early in my career. But, you make me nervous. I really want to know: will you be good for the profession or will you turn out to be a DICK?

That’s the View From Up North. Have a great week.

P.S. Don’t even get me started on Skynet.

Steve Dykstra is a Canadian-trained lawyer and legal recruiter. He is the President of Keybridge Legal Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm that places lawyers in law firms and in-house roles throughout North America. You can contact Steve at steve@keybridgerecruiting.com. You can also read his blog at stevendykstra.wordpress.com, follow him on Twitter (@IMRecruitR), or connect on LinkedIn (ca.linkedin.com/in/stevedykstra/).

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