Fear Not, Lawyers, AI Is Not Your Enemy

The dirty little secret of AI is that it can make us even better lawyers than we are without it.

I have just returned from the 2017 Futures Conference of the College of Law Practice Management, where the theme was “Running with the Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Law Practice.” It was a very good conference that, overall, took a pragmatic approach to a topic that is often overhyped. Even so, the conference — reflective of the legal profession in general — was permeated by a palpable, circle-the-wagons undercurrent of “us vs. them.”

Sophia Robot

The “us,” of course, is the legal profession generally and lawyers more specifically. The “them” is the robots that are coming to take away our jobs and that possibly have even more pernicious goals, up to and including human domination. There were repeated references to robot overlords, AI “going rogue,” and chatbots developing secret languages, with the embodiment of this being Sophia, the robot who, despite having once said she would “destroy humans,” was last week was given citizenship by Saudi Arabia.

In fairness, much of this was tongue-in-cheek. Speakers included some of the legal profession’s top thinkers and doers in AI. Programs such as “Hype vs. Reality: Is Everything AI Now?” and “Meet the Machines You’ll Be Running With” offered practical assessments and demonstrations of AI technology. But then there was also, “Robots Gone Wild: Mind-bending Videos and the Extraordinary Implications of Intelligent Machines.”

The problem with portraying AI in this way is that it perpetuates the protectionism that perennially inhibits innovation in law. It reflects the legal profession’s kneejerk distrust of anything new and shores up the attitude that lawyers represent the gold standard and that anything designed to supplant or substitute for the direct delivery of services by a lawyer is a bad thing all around.

This undercurrent underscores the fact that many legal professionals view AI today with the same skepticism and distrust that they had for LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer just a couple years ago (and that some still do). Indeed, one panel even raised the specter of robots violating prohibitions against the unauthorized practice of law. As one audience member pointed out, this anthropomorphizing of AI bears no relation to the state of AI science.

Here’s the thing: AI in the legal profession is not a rogue robot storming the halls of justice. It is not a sentient machine out to destroy humans or even lawyers. It is not even plotting to take away our jobs.

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AI is a tool. A tool that we control. It is a tool that can make us more effective and efficient at what we do. It is a tool that can help us deliver our services more quickly and at lower cost. It is a tool that can help us serve more clients and serve them better. It is a tool that can enhance the delivery of legal services and that can help to close the yawning justice gap. It is a tool for good, not for evil.

In fact, the dirty little secret of AI is that it can make us even better lawyers than we are without it. We tend to think of AI as a tool for efficiency, for streamlining our work. But the fact is that AI is demonstrably better at some of the tasks lawyers do than are lawyers alone. The truth is, lawyers are not always the gold standard. In some cases, the gold standard is lawyers plus AI.

One of the simplest examples of this comes from the world of eDiscovery. A common task in eDiscovery is review of documents to find those that are potentially relevant, so that they may be produced to the opposing side. Many lawyers cling to the belief that the gold standard here is eyes-on, manual review that they perform. No one and no thing is more adept at identifying relevance than a trained lawyer, and the more senior the lawyer, the better he or she is at this task.

The truth, however, as documented by study upon study, is that algorithms are far more accurate than humans in identifying relevant documents. So-called technology-assisted review programs can examine large sets of documents, identify and prioritize the most relevant, substantially reduce both the time and cost of review, and, in the process, achieve greater accuracy than lawyers working manually.

The conference presented several examples of how AI is already being used to enhance — not undermine — the delivery of legal services. Speakers demonstrated the use of Kira Systems for due diligence review, Catalyst Insight Predict for eDiscovery review, and Lex Machina for litigation intelligence.

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This is not to say that there are not legitimate policy and ethical questions surrounding AI in law that we need to confront. Should AI in legal be regulated and, if so, by whom? What ethical issues does AI raise regarding a lawyer’s duties of competence, confidentiality, and supervision?

A recurring issue at the conference was the opacity of AI technology. To what extent should we — and could we — have access to the algorithms underlying AI programs? How can we understand and account for algorithmic biases? To what extent, in effect, do we need to understand the “innards” of AI?

Maybe the best answer to these opacity questions was given by John Tredennick, CEO of Catalyst, when he analogized AI to the Star-On machine of Dr. Seuss that turned regular Sneetches into Star-Bellied Sneetches. All they needed to know, Tredennick suggested, was that they went in without stars and came out with them. How it worked was incidental.

CEO Ed Walters elicited laughter by showing the popular meme that compared the visual similarities between chihuahuas and blueberry muffins. The meme is sometimes cited as an illustration of the shortcomings of AI to distinguish between the two. In fact, however, AI has been shown to be more accurate than humans in distinguishing between the dogs and muffins.

Riffing off that image, Walters then delivered the best line of the conference. “Every time you say ‘robot lawyer,’” he admonished, “God turns a chihuahua into a blueberry muffin.”

AI is not a battleground. It is fertile ground. It is not lawyers vs. robots. It is lawyers plus AI. If we recognize and accept this, we can use AI to be better at what we do and to better serve our clients. And, while we’re at it, we might just save a few chihuahuas from ending up on the breakfast table.


Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert 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 ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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