Law Firm Asks AI Engine To Draft Answers: 'Upon Information And Belief... ERROR 404'

Artificial Intelligence assumes yet another task traditionally handled by brute (billable) force.

If there’s any task in litigation ripe for artificial intelligence to swoop in and take over, it’s the process of answering a complaint. Frankly, drafting an answer is the closest legal work comes to coding — carefully crafting a string of words to guarantee that it’s impossible to “run” any paragraph of the complaint to allow an admission of anything that isn’t absolutely, inarguably true.

It’s also just boring.

That’s where LegalMation’s solution comes in. Another in the arsenal of solutions out there working with IBM’s Watson technology, LegalMation allows the user to drag and drop the PDF of a complaint and get an answer back in around 2 minutes. And according to Patrick DiDomenico, chief knowledge officer at Ogletree, the results are pretty good.

That’s why Ogletree has become the first law firm to publicly announce that they use LegalMation’s product. While most of the action on these time-saving solutions happens with in-house counsel eager to avoid paying for outside counsel, Ogletree has a different philosophy:

But DiDomenico’s reaction was much different. He said lawyers have a responsibility to complete legal work in an efficient manner, and that means adopting tools such as LegalMation.

“Our duty is not to bill our clients. It’s to provide value and quality work product,” said DiDomenico, a vocal advocate for embracing legal tech. “If there are ways and tools to improve those things—the quality, consistency and efficiency of how we deliver those services to our clients—it is our responsibility to do that.”

The LegalMation system only handles Ogletree’s employment cases in California at this point, greatly reducing the risk of a complaint that will ask the computer to define “love” and force it to erupt in steam while yelling “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”

For Ogletree’s sake, maybe soon they’ll expand their use of the program to answer all the discrimination suits they’re facing.

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But, as we note whenever one of these dull tasks gets assumed by another of our robot superiors, junior attorneys have lost yet another rite of passage. There’s certainly no marginal value to drafting more than two or three meaty answers, but there’s a lot about the whole life of a lawsuit that lawyers can pick up when they’re forced to perform this exercise manually. As with coding, having to mentally break the case down to each constituent fact and premise does more to kickstart “thinking like a lawyer” than almost any other junior task.

It’s the delicate balance of the automation of the profession. No one genuinely suggests that legal technology will replace the judgment of a seasoned attorney, just that it will more quickly and more accurately perform the brute force tasks typically performed by junior associates fumbling their way toward the truth. On the other hand, if juniors never get their hands dirty with this foundational work, will they ever become the seasoned attorneys of the future?

That’s the challenge for legal education going forward. We sometimes mock the “practice ready” lingo as empty public relations copy, but law schools have farmed out basic practical instruction to law firms for a lot of years. And for good reason — a law firm is generally better situated to teach those skills than a legal academic — but the advancement of technology and more demanding clients may force firms out of the on-the-job education game.

How Ogletree Deakins Overcame Legal AI Burnout [American Lawyer]

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