Augmented Lawyering

Augmented Lawyering Presented by: Mr. Armour, Mr. Parnham and Mrs. Sako Date: 29 April 2020 Motivation - How will new technologies such as Al reshape the work of lawyers and the legal profession? • "There is no obvious reason that many of today's professionals won't be displaced by increasingly capable systems and then fade from prominence, much as blacksmiths, tallow chandlers, mercers, and many trades became redundant in their day." (Susskind, 2018) • "Even where automation has made significant progress, its impact has been less than the headlines would have us believe." (Remus & Levy, 2017) Mixed Methods - Qualitative • 50+ semi-structured interviews with professionals involved in implementing, or overseeing the implementation, of Al in legal services in the UK (Jan 2019May 2020) • Grouped mainly in 12 organizational case studies - law firms, corporate clients, "alternative legal service providers" (ALSPs) (law tech startups, ABS, big four, law companies etc.) - Quantitative • Anonymous survey of practicing solicitors in England & Wales, run in conjunction with the Law Society (Dec 2019-Jan 2020) • Distributed to >10,000 lawyers; 353 valid responses (3.5% response rate) Overview - Al in Legal Services - AI Deployment and Organizational Form - Quantitative Results - Implications for Law Firms and the Legal Profession - Conclusions AI in Legal Services Impact Of Technology On Work - - Technology has two effects • Substitution: technology replaces humans in some tasks • Complements: technology augments humans in some tasks Impact on workers/firms • Value of substitutable human capital goes down • Value of complementary human capital goes up Which Tasks Are Which? Impact Of Today's AI - Early 2000s: 'routine' (can be performed using an explicit set of rules) vs 'non-routine' (complex problem-solving) • "Navigating a car through city traffic or deciphering the scrawled handwriting on a personal check - minor undertakings for most adults are not routine tasks by our definition.... these tasks require visual and motor processing capabilities that cannot at present be described in terms of a set of programmable rules." (Autor et al, 2003) - Today: Machine learning means rules need not be written; just provide (lots of) relevant data • "[F]or the work of lawyers to be fully automated, engineering bottlenecks to creative and social intelligence will need to be overcome, implying that the computerization of legal research will complement the work of lawyers in the medium term" (Frey and Osborne, 2017). Applied To Legal Services... - Complements: • - Substituted: • - Traditional client advice; one- off/bespoke text- based work Repetitive / scalable text- based work New roles • Needed to make technical systems work:  Complements AI Use-Cases (1): Contracts - Contract analytics (e.g. ThoughtRiver, RAVN) • Increase speed/reduce cost of generating and reviewing "business as usual" commercial contracts according to firm/context-specific "playbook". - Due diligence (e.g. Luminance, Kira) • Increase speed/reduce cost of reviewing large corpuses of contracts prior to an acquisition. AI Use-Cases (2): Disputes - E-discovery (e.g. Epiq, Casepoint, OpenText) • Identify material relevant to a legal dispute that must be disclosed to the other side prior to proceedings. • ML model is trained for each new matter; particularly heavily used in US where discovery represents 70% of costs of litigation. - Litigation analytics (e.g. Solomonic, Legal Analytics) • Predict outcome of dispute based on facts, prior precedents, decision history of judge, lawyers, etc. {+ any other variables increasing predictive accuracy} • Increasingly available in US, also emerging in UK AI Use-Cases (3): “Business Of Law” - Predictive billing • Accurate prediction of likely time input required to complete work - enabling piece rate pricing - Capacity management • Predicting utilization and optimizing resourcing accordingly Multidisciplinary Teams AI Legal Services Pipeline - Design and Test Al product - Ingest data and ensure integrity - Labelling/ annotation - Application to decisions - Explanation Conclusions - Al mainly augments legal skills, rather than substitutes for them - Al deployment pipelines require multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) - • Organizational form is a relevant factor in MDT establishment • Traditional law firm partnerships face challenge • Entry of "law companies"; restructuring of law firms as ABS Legal human capital deployed in MDTs (non- advisory work) raises issues about boundaries of legal profession