This Week In Legal Tech: Book Review Of 'Robots In Law'
"You don’t choose your in-laws, but the in-law relationship can represent a significant part of your family dynamic, and it may require some careful handling."
There is an intentional double-entendre in the title of Joanna Goodman’s book, Robots in Law: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Legal Services (affiliate link). On one hand, the title refers to the popular notion of AI as robotic entities that threaten to replace lawyers. The title was inspired by a June 2016 event, “Robots and Lawyers,” held by the Law Society of England and Wales, that considered the partnership between lawyers and machines.
But the title also suggests the in-law relationship in a family. “You don’t choose your in-laws, but the in-law relationship can represent a significant part of your family dynamic, and it may require some careful handling,” Goodman explains.
This notion of AI as something about which you have no choice is perhaps the true theme of this book, which surveys the rising use of AI in law and offers predictions on where it might lead the legal industry. While the prospect of robots in law is threatening to many lawyers, one clear takeaway from this book is that those lawyers who most readily accept the reality of AI and incorporate it into their practices are the lawyers who will be most successful in years to come.
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Goodman quotes futurist Rohit Talwar, who emphasizes that AI is changing not only law, but also every other major economic sector, and that forward-thinking law firms will invest the needed time to understand these new technologies and their transformative potential.
“Whether firms seize the opportunity or become paralyzed by fear and indecision will ultimately be a matter of choice and a function of our willingness to step into the unknown and start learning,” Talwar says.
For those lawyers who fall into that group of wanting to better understand AI, there may be no better starting point than Robots in Law. Author Goodman is a freelance journalist in London who covers technology, business and media and who writes a column about legal IT for The Law Society Gazette. In 148-pages, she presents a broad overview of how AI is being used in law today and of its prospects for the future.
Its uses may be broader than you realize. Goodman includes in the book a mindmap produced by Michael Mills, cofounder and chief strategy officer of Neota Logic, that classifies legal AI into five categories:
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- Expertise automation, through products such as Neota Logic and Oracle Policy Automation.
- Legal research, through products such as Fastcase, LexisNexis, Ravel Law, ROSS and Thomson Reuters.
- Prediction, through products such as Lex Machina, LexPredict and Premonition.
- Contract analytics, through companies such as eBrevia, Kira Systems, Luminence and RAVN.
- Electronic discovery, through companies such as Catalyst, Relativity and Recommind.
The hottest market in legal AI today is M&A due diligence, Goodman says, where a number of major law firms on both sides of the pond have begun to take it up and where new products are regularly introduced.
The reason for this, she says, is that legal AI works best — at least so far — in narrow and specific applications. She quotes Peter Wallqvist, chief strategy officer of RAVN: “If you define a sufficiently narrow domain in which to operate, you are more likely to be successful.”
Even so, AI’s applications in law are rapidly broadening and the number of products rapidly expanding. This is being driven, in part, by a thriving global legal technology start-up community and growing interest in investing in legal technology.
“The fact that legal AI has turned a corner, and more firms are now actually using AI, is encouraging serial entrepreneurs and mainstream investors to get involved in the lawtech community,” Goodman says.
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That is not to say that the continued growth of AI in law is without challenges. Foremost among them are ethical and regulatory considerations and entrenched law firm business and cultural models. Overcoming these challenges, Goodman says, boil down to overcoming fear and building trust. “Ultimately, the incursion of AI into legal will relate to how far we are prepared to trust a ‘robot lawyer.’”
Several of the experts Goodman interviews for this book emphasize the error in viewing law and AI as a dichotomy. In truth, there is no separating the humans from the machines. Understanding that point helps solve the ethical and regulatory questions.
“There is no difference between regulating a lawyer’s use of a PC and regulating their use of an algorithm or AI engine,” Paresh Kathrani, senior law lecturer at the University of Westminster, tells Goodman. “The existing codes and ethics are broad enough to cover artificial intelligence.”
Understanding this point also helps solve questions about the business case for AI in legal. Kathrani says the relationship between law and AI is like yin and yang, with one influencing the other. “AI is not about to replace lawyers, but the practice of law will evolve and adapt. Law and lawyers will remain relevant because law is a lived experience. The question is how they remain relevant, and AI will surely influence that.”
If robots are indeed our new in-laws, then they certainly do require some careful handling, as Goodman suggests. Equally true is that, if they are now part of our professional family, we’d better learn how best to live with them.
Robots in Law is published by the Ark Group. The paperback can be purchased from the Ark Group’s website for $95 or via Amazon. No digital version is available.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
