Modern Law Magazine Issue 27 - Artificial Intelligence: Innovation Through Automation

You’ve got highly intelligent, highly trained individuals doing complex, nuanced work, who, all of a sudden, have to deal with and compete with AI that is more capable than anything that’s come before Gerard Frith

Artificial Intelligence: Innovation Through Automation

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 2016

MODERN LAW

WELCOME elcome to the Modern Law Magazine Artificial Intelligence (AI) Supplement. As we enter 2017 it’s a good time to look ahead to what the future will have in store for the legal sector, and it seems undeniable now that AI will be, and is already becoming, a game-changer in the profession.

To some people, the phrase Artificial Intelligence might conjure images of apocalyptic futures ruled by rogue supercomputers and Austrian bodybuilder androids. To more people, it probably means futuristic, yet very attainable technologies, such as autonomous vehicles. However, you might not realise that AI is already prevalent in society, and that you probably already use it in your everyday life.

While online chatbots and the iPhone’s Siri can simplify the organisation of your personal life, the capabilities of AI are much wider reaching, and effective implementation of it can greatly benefit a law firm. From answering enquiries to document automation and much more, AI can potentially relieve lawyers from the less arduous aspects of their jobs, freeing them up to focus on those tasks, such as the client-facing duties, that only a human can truly accomplish.

AI is still in its relative infancy, and so this balance may change in the future as AI becomes more advanced than it already is as it evolves. One of the reservations legal professionals may have about AI is the potential for it to ultimately replace lawyers.

However, the consensus in this supplement is that law is a highly personal profession, one in which clients will place a great deal

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of faith in their lawyers when facing life-changing situations, and therefore the human touch will always be integral to the industry.

What is certain, however, based on the interviews and articles in these pages, is that AI will play an important role in the future, and the legal sector should embrace this, rather than attempt to ignore it. It is not often a technology is introduced that provides such obvious benefits to firms, and as a result the legal profession can often be slow to adopt them when one does come along. I hope this supplement will demonstrate how AI could help enhance your law firm.

This futuristic focus continues in Modern Law Magazine, where we interview Professor Richard Susskind, author and innovator, about the evolution of AI. Thanks to Matter for sponsoring this supplement, and to everybody who has contributed to these pages. If you have any comments or feedback I’d love to hear them. You can get in touch via the details below, and we’ll be happy to talk to you (or your chatbot!).

Brendan Gurrie, Editor, Modern Law Magazine.

01765 600909 | @ModernBrendan | brendan@charltongrant.co.uk

CONTENTS

INTERVIEWS

FEATURES

6 Gerard Frith

While AI is seen as a great unknown by many in the legal profession, one thing that is certain is that it can provide huge benefits to firms that adopt it. Gerard Frith spoke to Modern Law about the current applications of AI, and how its role might change in the coming years.

10 Prof. Luke Mason

New technologies like AI can greatly improve work flow and efficiency for a law firm. Andrew Joint told Modern Law how Kemp Little is utilising AI and how this helps them thrive in the ever-changing world of technology law.

Katie Gibbs, Matter, on the ways in which Artificial Intelligence will impact the legal sector, and how both the public and law firms can adapt to these changes.

22 How AI will deliver law firms improved profitability

Modern Law spoke to Professor Luke Mason about the role AI will take in the legal profession, and how the sector must find the balance between automation and human interaction.

14 Andrew Joint

20 2016 is the year of AI, so what does this mean for the legal profession?

AI can complete time-consuming tasks, freeing up lawyers to focus on those tasks that require the human touch. Ben Taylor, Rainbird AI, discusses how this can be achieved.

24 The Missing Piece of the Puzzle – The Role of the Legal Engineer

Catherine Bamford, Founder of BamLegal, describes the increasingly important role of the legal engineer and explains that it’s not just about being a techie.

26 Improving the craft of conveyancing

Hugo-Pickford Wardle discusses why he feels the conveyancing process is ripe for automation, and how doing so could improve the system for conveyancers and their clients, and have implications for the entire law profession.

28 I wouldn’t start from here…

Building a sustainable AI solution from the inside out

30 Case Study

Editor Brendan Gurrie

December 2016

Project Manager John Margett

Business to Consumer, AI to Human

Editorial Assistant Liam Lambert

Events Sales Kate McKittrick

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 03

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You’ve got highly intelligent, highly trained individuals who know that the stuff they do is complex, and they’re now dealing with AI that are more capable than anything that’s come before them

INTERVIEW

Gerard Frith While AI is seen as a great unknown by many in the legal profession, one thing that is certain is that it can provide huge benefits to firms that adopt it. Gerard Frith spoke to Modern Law about the current applications of AI, and how its role might change in the coming years.

Q A

What are the features of a typical AI system in 2016?

outperformed junior lawyers and paralegals when they have very large sets of documents to process for litigation.

There is no such thing as a typical AI, because everything is advancing so quickly. The term is mostly used to describe deep learning technologies and bots. Deep learning technologies are focused on things like visual perception. Google has done a lot of work with this - an AI system can look at a picture and say: there are two glasses of wine and a pizza. It is automatic labelling of pictures and their content. Google has also done a lot of work with face recognition, and their systems are now better at recognizing who people are. It’s very interesting, and about 90% accurate.

We’re also seeing the introduction of ‘Big Data’ techniques.

There are things like the Lex Machina service, which is actually better than expert litigators in predicting the results of court decisions. Corporate lawyers in due-diligence work have used other technologies, and they’ve been very effective. There are big opportunities here to productise professional services in general, but also law specifically. The problem with law has always been that if you want to double your revenue, you have to double your staff of professionals, in order to generate that billable work.

They have also done a lot with general problem solving and deep learning. For example, they asked all of their Google data centres: what is the optimum way to consider the power supply to one of my data centres? They ended up saving about 25% of their energy bill. Considering they’ve got more servers than anyone else in the world, that’s a big deal.

If you look at companies like Facebook or Google, they don’t have the same kind of cost structures, and they’re very happy to push margins up to ninety percent, in some cases. Their margins tend to grow as they scale, because they’re able to productise more aspects of the work. We’re starting to see this now in professional services; any high volume task that requires judgement is very apt for this kind of automation. This leaves professionals with more time to focus on jobs that need a little bit more sophistication, and will generate higher value for the company.

Then there are bots, which is AI you can have a conversation with.

The real focus here is customer support. A lot of the web chat you engage with when you contact a customer support centre will be with an AI, rather than a human. They’re getting very good at handling conversations within a tight domain - if you want a conversation about your parcel delivery, they’ll be pretty good, but if you want to chat about Nietzsche, they won’t be so good.

The other big area is decision making for things like management, governance and compliance obligations, which are increasingly becoming stress points within big organizations.

There are a lot of expert systems coming into the market that can be used to catch the knowledge of existing experts within the company and subsequently structure a framework of rules.

The systems can automatically process whether something is compliant or not, or if something is meeting government regulations. They are very good at dealing with ambiguity as well, not just supplying a hard set of rules, and they’re great not only for improvement of contracts, but for reviewing historic contracts to highlight any problems that may have occurred.

Q A

If the work is reviewing legal agreements and you’re charging £300 an hour, and it takes ten hours to do, you could automate the process to make it take two hours, resulting in a huge increase in your productivity. You can charge a lower rate for the work, but you’re not going to charge five-times less.

AI is currently not good at demonstrating deep empathy, and there are certain aspects of law where a personal touch is critical

How can law firms utilize AI to improve their workflow and efficiency?

There are already a lot of tools out there that can be used in preparation of litigation. Some intelligence systems have

December 2016

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 07

INTERVIEW

Conveyancing is very much open to the opportunity of automation.

It will remove a lot of frustration and make processes faster and more positive for consumers On a day-to-day level, there are a lot of general purpose AIs that are very useful as personal assistants. I use an AI to make all of my meeting arrangements. She, or it, will have correspondence with people I need meetings with, and automatically look for appropriate travel arrangements. It can write emails to set these meetings up, and understand the emails that come back from clients and partners.

Some of the more interesting and advanced areas here are again to do with decision support. We would be working with a law firm to, for example, understand how they can answer medium complexity questions from clients that might take administrators two days to process. An AI can do that work more quickly, so a lawyer can then review it before it goes out. I’m talking about questions like: ‘Is a calculation right?’ It’s a medium complexity question, the answer to which would need to contain research, and references to case law, and internal firm precedents.

Q A

How will AI affect the everyday legal consumer?

What AI should be able to do is increase professional productivity.

If you take that last example, in those low to medium complexity situations, AI can provide decision support and research. They can allow professionals to focus more of their time on client relationships and can allow businesses to cover a larger number of clients. I think cost will be one of the key things here - cost pressure, in general, is one of the key problems in law at the moment. We’ll see quite an interesting combination of lower costs and better service.

Conveyancing is very much open to the opportunity of automation.

It will remove a lot of frustration and make processes faster and more positive for consumers. I think AI will be enormously helpful in improving consumer attitudes towards the legal profession.

There are also some situations where we’ll see the removal of the need for lawyers in certain aspects of law. We’re already seeing that to some degree in document assembly systems, where we have things like Contract Express, that can generate high quality documents based on interactions with a user. They were originally designed for the legal profession, but now we’re seeing them available online for other uses.

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Do you ever see AI completely replacing legal professionals, or will there always need to be a human element?

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I was asked this question at a conference hosted by Kemp Little, recently, and my answer was booed! We are already seeing a sixty percent reduction in the number of core staff, particularly PAs, at law firms. This isn’t just in law either, it’s across the board. Paralegals will be replaced to some extent, that’s inevitable. The Future of Employment study by the University of Oxford - which looked at the impact of automation on various professions - put paralegals and legal assistants in the highest risk category, with a 94% chance of being automated.

Conversely, lawyers were in the lowest risk category.

We’re a long way off in some areas. AI is currently not good at demonstrating deep empathy, and there are certain aspects of law where a personal touch is critical. In areas where intellectual processes are more important than personal interaction, jobs are at higher risk. Culturally, we are not in a position where the presence of a person in a negotiation situation can be substituted for an AI. In the short term, paralegals and legal assistants will simply have more tools at their disposal.

Q A

Are there forms of AI in other sectors that the legal profession should be utilising?

There are two interesting areas. One is the use of big data applications, and I’d group deep learning with that. Deep learning is exceptionally good at understanding big lumps of data. A really simple example is Google’s DeepMind system. They set it to get really good at the video games Breakout and Space Invaders. They didn’t tell it what the rules of the games were, they just let it play the games, and it worked out how to play them well within an hour. It took two hours to get good, and after five hours it was better than any human had been.

That’s the key thing though: it wasn’t taught to do it, it taught itself by observing others. There are lots of opportunities for these big data, deep learning systems to digest the corpus of law, and to start offering advice on that basis. We’ve seen this with IBM’s Watson system, which has learned about oncology. There are so many new publications on cancer that it’s impossible for any individual to keep up with it. Watson can keep up with them, and it can help cancer specialists to diagnose earlier and prescribe more effectively. They even noticed that Watson’s diagnoses were 20% more accurate than those of expert oncologists. It’s actually now functioning as a doctor, doing consultations with patients.

With that in mind, there’s nothing to say the same couldn’t be done with law.

The other area is very different: customer experience. In consumer facing law, I would expect to see the growth of bots being interfaced for case management and case progression. What we’ve been allowed to do is provide a 24/7 service, which would be very appealing to people. Bots can be used to provide a first line of support for customers.

Q A

What are the challenges of implementing an AI system, and how can they be addressed?

The biggest challenge is dealing with the disbelief that it works. You’ve got highly intelligent, highly trained individuals who know that the stuff they do is complex, and they’re now dealing with AI more capable than anything that’s come before them. There is also the fear that they might work too well, and have too big of an impact on the profession.

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INTERVIEW

Some intelligence systems have outperformed junior lawyers and paralegals when they have very large sets of documents to process for litigation Other issues include risk. If you’re implementing decision support or compliance monitoring, there’s a question about whether a human or an AI is more trustworthy. People feel more safe when they know a human is dealing with them.

Nobody programs a lot of the systems we see now. Take selfdriving cars for example: when one of these cars runs somebody over, people want to know how liable the car’s developer is. This is a misunderstanding of how automation works. There is no developer – the systems learn. They look at situations from which they base their decisions on.

What makes this difficult is that once a system has learned, you can’t open it up and work out what it has learned, and therefore learn from it. This makes it hard to ask an AI why it’s done something. You can ask a junior that, and they’ll understand and give you an explanation.

But this is an entirely new form of relationship.

Q A

Why have law firms struggled to keep up with the technological pace seen in other sectors?

Aspects of this are to do with legal education. Until recently, there hasn’t been much tech-presence in legal education. For most other subjects, tech is used as a part of the degree process.

Technology also hasn’t served law very well, until recently. With the exception of systems like email and word processing, there hasn’t been a real need to see technology within law. But AI has taken everyone by surprise – it isn’t well understood or well adopted within any profession or industry, with the exception of the digital industry that created it. Cost is also an issue - although there are plenty of big law firms with money to invest, there are also a lot of small firms without the budget or in-house specialists to invest in AI.

Q A

What will be the ‘next big thing’ in legal technology, and how will this alter the way that legal services are delivered?

The greatest pressure in legal practice is cost. The second biggest is customer service. Those two issues together mean that the ‘next big thing’ is process automation. It just makes sense to build efficiency into the core processes of the things you do. We have technology that can apply deductive reasoning and can look at nuances in the way experts make decisions, and we have bots that allow us to manage routine customer interactions.

Q A

What is next for Matter?

We are looking for innovative partners in law to help with the process of automation. We’re very interested in proving that these technologies work in smaller areas, before they can be rolled out across larger practices. We’re tech agnostic at this firm, so we work with a whole bunch of different technology product firms, which allows us to work across a number of different industries. Many of the interesting things here are not going to be achieved by one piece of technology alone, but through working with professionals to see how they want to take their firm forward. They can combine different technologies, like AI personal assistant bots, with more complex case management and research tools. This will let us build firms of the future that can reconsider how they are going to use the skills available to them in order to gain a competitive advantage.

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Gerard Frith Gerard has more than 20-years experience in the artificial intelligence and management consultancy fields. He graduated from his first degree in AI in 1995, then worked for Deloitte designing and building AI solutions for financial services and fraud protection. Later, he designed medical AI systems to analyse and make recommendations against large corpuses of patient data. Over the last 5 years his focus has been on designing customer experience and process automation solutions across a range of industries (legal, insurance, health, government, marketing) using AI, especially expert systems, natural language, and bot technologies.

Gerard Frith is Chairman of Matter and Chief Strategy Officer of Chelsea Apps Factory. For further information phone 020 8242 4300, or visit experiencematter.co.uk or chelsea-apps.com

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 09

The ‘heroic’ aspects of legal practice, of spotting injustices and demanding new approaches to reflect new social and technological realities, are human activities

INTERVIEW

Luke Mason Modern Law spoke to Professor Luke Mason about the role AI will take in the legal profession, and how the sector must find the balance between automation and human interaction.

Q A

Which, if any, elements of human input in the legal profession will never be replaced by AI?

AI is supremely capable in terms of deductive reasoning.

Most aspects of the legal profession’s tasks can be seen as having this element as their principal component. This suggests that almost all human aspects of legal practice could be replaced.

However, while lawyers might overestimate the uniqueness of their ‘intelligence’, they probably also underestimate how important it is that humans carry out many of those tasks. Those legal roles where we expect a human being to take moral responsibility for a decision, such as those involving adjudication, cannot be readily replaced by a computer. This is not because AI is incapable of making such decisions, nor because we cannot blame it for errors (we could have a system of insurance for such mistakes for instance), but because law is a cultural artifact, like art or literature, which we want humans to produce, even if computers are equally capable of doing so. We all, lawyers and non-lawyers, surely demand that humans take authorship of certain legal roles and acts. It would be within the technological capabilities of AI to carry out these tasks, but it would not fit with what we demand of a legal system at all times.

Equally, the deductive reasoning of AI essentially reduces legal practice to the prediction, and therefore replication, of previous outcomes, ensuring consistency but also entrenching errors and accentuating conservatism. The ‘heroic’ aspects of legal practice, of spotting injustices and demanding new approaches to reflect new social and technological realities, are human activities.

Equally, the deeply creative elements, which characterise certain applications of legal rules, mean that much of what lawyers do is in fact less deductive than we might first think. This all means that while very few legal roles cannot be mimicked by AI, the legal profession should rightly demand that they retain authorship of many aspects of legal practice, at least at a supervisory level, as in practice there is no clear delineation of the creative and deductive aspects of legal practice.

The tasks which remain in human hands in the legal profession will not do so because of some skills that computers are not capable of mimicking or even improving, but rather because lawyers can convince people of that value that humans should be taking such decisions. However, what is inevitable is that even these tasks, like all elements of legal practice, will move into a ‘post-human’ phase of legal practice. Even those services provided by humans will be

December 2016

done with significant help from AI, to the extent that it becomes very difficult to distinguish between those elements that are the result of human input, decision or thought, and those aspects which are the result of AI. This poses a whole range of problems that have not been fully considered by policy makers, lawyers, technologists or service providers in this field.

Which risks associated with AI might face law firms, and how can these be circumvented?

The adoption of AI will pose problems for perceptions regarding the real value of the product offered, and might also cause clients to wonder what they are paying so much for, when the services being provided are simply automated.

Positioning the service offered as either a far more streamlined one on the one hand, or, on the other hand, a more augmented service incorporating strategic advice and consultancy services might be a way of responding to this tension. Lawyers might end up responding to their growing obsolescence by reinventing themselves as more erudite providers of beefed up services, for businesses involving a more diversified basket of commercial products and services. If mergers and acquisitions lawyers can also advise on strategy in that field, their product becomes far more marketable again.

In terms of the actual quality of the product and legal services provided following the widespread adoption of AI, there is an acute problem posed by technology in all fields. If lawyers delegate many of their tasks to AI, their legal skills can become duller through lack of practice, and they will tend to rely on AI to

Q A

I think many off-the-shelf legal services will be available through glossy graphic user interfaces like many other products offered digitally, a lot of which incorporate AI Artificial Intelligence Supplement 11

INTERVIEW

Digital natives are proudly part of what we might call the first truly post-human generation, where people are happy to carry out a huge variety of tasks with massive input from AI get things right. This very fact will make it harder for lawyers to spot or correct errors that AI produces. It is very difficult to know how to resolve this problem, as the best way to develop legal skills is to use them. Firms will have to be aware of this issue and try and develop proxies to maintain and improve legal skills.

Why has the legal sector historically been slow to adopt new technologies, and will there be similar resistance to AI?

All regulated professions have their rent-seeking tendencies, and there is of course resistance to technologies that people see as a threat to their job, or even those that push them out of their comfort zone. Lawyers might see AI as the Luddites saw the automation of the textiles industry, which would certainly make it more likely that there is a continued resistance. The legal profession is also inherently conservative in its in-built assumptions and values; in some ways conservatism is the essence of the Rule of Law, so this is to be expected. Law firms have also traded effectively on their traditional, and therefore reliable, image, meaning change has not been driven by demand. The deregulation of legal services provision opens up the possibility of greater disruptive business practices however, and a heightened environment of competition might result in new entrants shaking things up in this regard. There is a universal human tendency to view intelligence as uniquely human in some sense, and lawyers will likely resist any wholesale attempt to conspicuously replace their jobs with AI. What might also occur, however, is the concerted mobilisation of the legal lobby to regulate or restrict the use of AI in certain legal areas.

What other technologies should the legal sector be seeking to adopt in the future?

The introduction of AI into legal practice will almost certainly see a realignment of the nature of the core services provided by lawyers, with law firms forced to provide an augmented service more akin to management consultancy or advisors on risk, in order to add value to the provision of services fulfilled by AI. This might require the legal profession to adopt many of the technologies used in those fields, in particular IT which is capable of dealing with complex numerical calculations. What the legal industry will also need to develop is the ability to ‘talk’ to coders and code itself, to ensure that law is capable of having the knowledge and syntax which allows it to impact on the legal outcomes produced by AI. It will also need to ensure that it can deal appropriately with legal questions posed by the regulation of other technologies driven

by AI, including questions of evidence, causation and standards

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Law is a cultural artifact, like art or literature, which we want humans to produce, even if computers are equally capable of doing so

12 Artificial Intelligence Supplement

of care, for instance. Law will very quickly need to come to terms not only with AI doing law, but also law regulating AI. There is a real danger of an unwitting deference here, which the law often develops when called upon to regulate an area that it does not fully understand. This damages both the credibility of the law and the field in question in the long run.

How will AI systems evolve in the coming years?

Q A

The ability of AI systems to engage in complex, non-linear reasoning and problem-solving while also being able to learn is increasing exponentially. This poses deep problems for law, because AI is moving close to the point where it can carry out even the most complex of tasks, such as deep legal reasoning in what we call ‘hard cases’. The advent of quantum computing might signal an additional layer of complexity and potential in AI, although the precise range of tasks which quantum-based AI might be able to deal with is still speculative.

Is enough being done to educate law students about new and emerging technologies and how these can be beneficial in their future careers?

Almost certainly not, given that legal education is still largely dominated by the idealised vision of Nineteenth Century common law that has characterised it for the last 100 years or so, for better or worse. However, if human lawyers are to maintain their added value as providers of legal services that can outstrip those provided by AI, it is desirable that legal education strengthens its focus on creativity, critical thinking and commercial and social awareness. Any focus on AI should probably take two forms: an understanding of the growing role of AI in the general nature and practice of law on the one hand, and an engagement with the practicalities of providing legal services with the help of AI during the vocational stage of legal training on the other. I cannot envisage formal education adopting this approach in the near future however, and firms must invest in this training.

What are some of the ways digital natives entering the legal profession will disrupt and alter the sector?

The big thing here is that digital natives are proudly part of what we might call the first truly post-human generation, where people are happy to carry out a huge variety of tasks with massive input from AI, where it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the human input and the computer input. This will make them culturally far more comfortable with incorporating AI-based practices into their own working practices. However, it also makes them more susceptible to trusting the outcomes reached by AI and failing to spot conclusions that they themselves might ordinarily find unsatisfactory. This is not so much a question of digital natives being familiar with the use of IT, whose increasing use in legal procedure is often confused with the growing impact of AI on law. The introduction of IT changes the speed and mode of delivery of legal communication, and makes redundant the need for legal processes and services to take place anywhere in the physical world, instead taking place in cyberspace. However, this does not change the fundamental nature of legal services or legal practice. The new generation of lawyers are not only digital natives in that sense, but rather are also what we might call AI-natives in

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December 2016

INTERVIEW

It is very easy to develop a moral panic connected to AI, and there is already, quite reasonably, a high degree of suspicion of the legal sector that they have incorporated it into their daily reasoning processes. If millennials make post-human decisions regarding sex and romance, deeply personal issues, using the AI of online dating, they will have no qualms or difficulty in doing this at work in a law firm.

Does the legal sector need to modernise its image, through the implementation of technologies like AI, for example, and if so, how else can it achieve this?

The legal sector will ultimately thrive on trust. Any image that is developed through the use of AI must take advantage of the neutral and unbiased nature of AI, while retaining a focus on the high-trained and justice-focused nature of human components of the system or the firm. This is a complex balance. It is very easy to develop a moral panic connected to AI, and there is already, quite reasonably, a high degree of suspicion of the legal sector, as it operates in a field which people do not understand and which regulates and impacts upon their lives so obviously.

Will legal consumers be quick to accept AI systems in law, particularly as they are used for more advanced B2C correspondence?

I think many off-the-shelf legal services will be available through glossy graphic user interfaces like many other products offered digitally, a lot of which incorporate AI. The ease of use of such delivery dictates that clients will accept this, if they are sure about the quality of the product that is offered. Those clients who want a more bespoke service and B2C correspondence will undoubtedly also demand a greater added value from legal products in the future, including strategy and consulting to go with their purely legal advice or services. This should reserve a place for legal services with a human face, but they will often be more ‘boutique’ in nature. Of course, the non-legal aspects of client-facing parts of the legal sector can also be carried out by non-lawyers in certain circumstances. If AI is carrying out much of the legal tasks, this role becomes more one of customer care in any case.

How will the role of the lawyer change as more advanced AI systems get introduced into the legal profession?

Law will face a deep challenge. The supervision of these processes will become increasingly important, but lawyers will increasingly lose the ability, practice and confidence to second guess the superior deductive reasoning of AI. The greatest challenge for the law in general is in convincing the world at large that having human oversight and human responsibility is a good thing if we want an accountable and just legal system, even if that means that some elements of it might be more capricious and more prone to error.

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December 2016

Luke Mason Luke Mason is a philosopher and academic lawyer whose research and expertise focuses on the nature of legal reasoning, and on the relationship between law, science and technology. He is currently working on the links between law and quantum mechanics. From January 2017, Luke is Senior Lecturer in Law and Theory at St Mary’s University, London. He was previously Lecturer in Law and Philosophy and Director of Learning and Teaching at the University of Surrey. He has held academic positions in various countries, and has also worked as a government policy adviser. He has won various awards for law teaching, including the coveted national prize ‘Law Teacher of the Year’ in 2014.

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 13

As a junior lawyer in this millennium, it was still common practice even in large city law firms that drafts of documents were exchanged via post, with changes made in pen

INTERVIEW

Andrew Joint New technologies like AI can greatly improve work flow and efficiency for a law firm. Andrew Joint told Modern Law how Kemp Little is utilising AI and how this helps them thrive in the ever-changing world of technology law.

Q A

Could you tell me about the AI systems you employ, and the benefits this has brought to your firm?

Within Kemp Little we’ve already been using AI systems in a couple of different ways. Both have involved document review activities looking at a large volume of contracts and analysing these agreements. The analysis performed relates to specific issues we’ve asked the AI to report on; in our case we’ve had the AI looking at agreements and reviewing and analysing for ‘Brexit’ and ‘Data Processing’ related issues.

The AI allows us to analyse a large volume of agreements quickly.

This lets us perform tasks for our clients more efficiently. It also allows us to ‘free-up’ the time of our lawyers who do not need to be involved in some of the more mundane aspects of legal work and can focus their time on analysing and problem-solving, where they can bring real benefit to clients.

Q A

What was it that encouraged you to implement an AI system?

We are a technology specialist law firm, where technology is at the heart of our business. Part of our role is to keep firmly abreast of all evolutions in technology and how they are likely to impact businesses and the wider world. As such, we’ve noted the rise of available AI from mere science-fiction to mainstream and enterprise-ready solutions over the last few years. We are confident that AI is going to have a seismic impact across near enough all industries and all aspects of society. Whilst AI might challenge and threaten existing business structures, it also brings huge benefits and opportunities to every business. As such, to ignore or reject such an impacting and revolutionary technology would be akin to standing like King Canute and attempting to turn back the tide of change - it is coming, whether you want it or not - and additionally risk missing out on the benefits that can be achieved with embracing such change.

Whilst no-one seems to have any firm certainty on the impact of AI in businesses or society, there are some widely espoused concerns regarding the impact on the modern human workforce due to AI use. However, we think AI allows us to use tools to remove some aspects of the lawyer’s role, allowing them to focus on the more interesting and challenging parts of the role – typically those focused on analysis and problem solving and the client-facing aspects of the role.

December 2016

Q A

What challenges did you face when implementing AI? Our experience shows that there are two key challenges with implementing an AI.

The first key challenge of the AI implementation, compared to other implementations we’ve seen, is in relation to the learning/ training the AI needs during implementation. Typically in IT, you do not expend energies in teaching the IT solution what to do, you simply set up and interface/use the solution as it is set up to perform. With the AI implementations we have been through, there was a period where we needed to ‘train’ the AI with our approach and styles so it can learn to replicate the activity. As an IT customer, this is a different sort of implementation activity, where there is a critical dependency on us, the customer, during the implementation.

The second key challenge is in relation to trust. AI it is not just a tool for checking spelling or cross-referencing, it is actually reviewing and presenting preliminary advice. As the activity of the AI is more significant than other IT applications, the lawyer’s inherent conservatism around trusting activities we’ve not ourselves performed arises. Part of the implementation challenge is getting people to ‘trust’ the AI and understand what it can, and just as importantly cannot, do.

Whilst AI might challenge and threaten existing business structures, it also brings huge benefits and opportunities to every business

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 15

INTERVIEW

We are confident that AI is going to have a seismic impact across near enough all industries and all aspects of society

Q A

Are enough law firms effectively utilising technology, and how do you see this changing in the future?

Well, there seems to have been an increased amount of legal press coverage in the last couple of months regarding headline-making news of law firms using AI solutions. Often, our experience of these to date is that the solutions and the uptake is somewhat more narrow/limited.

Law has traditionally been a conservative profession in terms of wholesale/radical changes in how it organises its business structures, or the methods it uses to provide services. As a junior lawyer in this millennium, it was still common practice even in large city law firms that drafts of documents were exchanged via post, with changes made in pen. So it is not surprising that the pace of law firm investment and use of AI technologies has been slower than in some other sectors to date. In the ‘professional services’ world, the accountants and consultants have typically been quicker and better adopters of newer technologies than lawyers, who have lagged behind in IT use to perform legal services and run their businesses.

However, the good thing is that AI technology is revolutionary.

Because of that revolutionary effect, it can have the impact of making a lot of previous IT development and use obsolete. It has the potential to have a uniform impact on the preceding ways of working for all professional services professions, not just the lawyers, which means that lawyers need not be left behind in its use, as the solutions which are arising are arriving for all professional services organisations at the same time.

Clients are operating under increasing pressures relating to time and cost on their own businesses. They quite rightly feel that lawyers should not be isolated from these pressures as well. Lawyers therefore need to be prepared to have solutions to the provision of legal services which show that they are efficient and effective in terms of time, price and quality. Technology is part of the solution which clients will be demanding (if they are not already demanding it!). But technology isn’t the only part. The qualitative aspect of the provision of legal service depends on a lot of human-based input, but technology can be an important part, and as an important part I can see many law firms focusing on it in the future.

The qualitative aspect of the provision of legal service depends on a lot of human-based input, but technology can be an important part

Q A

Are there AI practises utilised in other industries that the legal sector could adopt?

The most obvious area of immediate AI use within the legal sectors relates to those time/document ‘heavy’ review tasks which most often arise within corporate M&A tasks: the due diligence phase, and in large litigation matters, the discovery phase. Many of the activities within these phases feel like activities that could learn from other sectors’ use of large review and analytical AI technologies, to streamline and make the process more efficient.

One area prevalent in other industries, which feels like the next step for the legal sector, is in relation to the AI performing tasks that involve client interaction, such as a ‘robo-advice’ function where the voice/communication from the human lawyer is replaced by an AI generated conversation. To date, these technologies have made it into the mainstream consciousness via our interactions with Apple’s ‘Siri’, Amazon Echo’s ‘Alexa’, or customer service centres regarding your TV subscription invoice.

Currently, I don’t think people are comfortable with machines presenting significant advice; travel directions are fine, advice on their will or divorce perhaps less so. However, the legal services sector will be watching society for the point where it can provide its ‘trusted advisor’ role via AI in such a way that the recipient is comfortable with that delivery method.

Q A

Are there any risks associated with AI, and how does Kemp Little defend against these?

If you watch ‘Terminator’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ or the ‘Matrix’, you would imagine there are umpteen risks in using AI, including to human life/existence. However, away from the fictional sensationalism, the simple fact is that the provision of any legal service comes with a risk. Will a human lawyer misread a sentence, make a typo, forget an important piece of statute, etc.?

These risks exist with the AI who will undertake the task currently being performed by the lawyer, but in many ways that risk is mitigated by the statistical protection that technology is typically less error-prone than humans at many of the review tasks.

In relation to protections that we as a business implement, the key aspect is that we retain a human involvement and intervention in the AI activity. Obviously the AI can, and will, be set up so that it relays to a human certain situations/challenges that it faces, for example where it cannot read a scan of a document completely, where pages are missing, etc. At these points a human can intervene and deal. In addition, where we’ve used the AI to review and analyse, we then have that analysis reviewed by a lawyer who isn’t repeating the exercise but is reviewing the output for quality assurance.

Q A

What are some of the differences in specialising in media and technology in comparison to other areas of legal work?

Technology law is really like no other aspect of the legal profession, simply because of the pace at which it can change. We are faced with so many ground breaking developments and changes on a monthly basis; take the last 15 years, where we’ve faced the rise of the internet, mobile devices, apps, the cloud, big data, 3D printing, etc., and now we are dealing with AI. It means that we are in a constant state of applying the known and existing parts of law to new technologies. We are then

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December 2016

INTERVIEW

trying to find answers to the queries and the problems the new technologies create without any firm legal precedent to rely on; it is all new! It means it is a challenge for the legal advisor who has to think around issues and be creative where in many aspects there is a lack of certainty and a lot of potential for change and development; it doesn’t suit every type of lawyer.

Q A

Which issues of data protection and privacy arise when specialising in media and technology?

Technology law is really like no other aspect of the legal profession, simply because of the pace at which it can change

Data protection has been a key influence on the IT industry in Europe since the 1995 EU Data Privacy Directive was implemented (in the UK via the Data Protection Act 1998 which has been in force from 2000). At the point where more data was able to be collected, stored, analysed and monetised than at any previous point in history, the legislation arrived to dictate behaviours around many of these activities for data relating to the individual.

It is very unusual to deal with an IT arrangement these days without data protection/privacy legislation concerns being at the very least a minor consideration, and typically far more dealdefining than that. In addition, the individuals’ understanding of the value of their data and concerns about its use/misuse has meant that as consumers we have great demands on providers of any services as to how they use and look after our data. Data protection is an important part of how customers view their service providers, and events such as data hacks/loss are now very newsworthy and business impacting.

Typically, the data protection/privacy impact in technology matters we deal with arises due to the following: • The method as to how the data was obtained, and whether it was lawful and gathered in a manner that permits its onward intended use.

• How it is stored and used, is it being looked after appropriately, and where it is being sent? Technology has shrunk the planet and it has meant that often people want to send data globally, and the law often intervenes in relation to how that can and cannot be done.

Q A

Do you have plans to utilise AI in more ways in the future?

Yes, we are always on the lookout for how we can better provide legal services to our clients and make Kemp Little a better place to work for our lawyers and support staff. AI will throw up further chances to do that, and as they come along we will review the opportunity and implement where we agree there is a benefit.

Q A

What else does the future hold for Kemp Little in terms of technology use?

Via some projects we’ve been working on, some of our lawyers (who happen to also be pretty ‘techy’ – we attract that sort!) developed certain tools to aid in their tasks, particularly where they were being asked to perform activities that could be better undertaken by software. We realised, or clients have told us, that these tools have commercial application, and we are also looking to see how we can better develop and then roll-out these tools.

December 2016

Andrew Joint Andrew is an experienced technology and outsourcing lawyer who works within a variety of sectors including heavily regulated industries. He has particular and deep experience in Cloud, BPO, business transformational, IoT and complex technology contracting and advising. He is also heavily involved in emerging areas of technology such as AI. He is recognised in Chambers & Partners as a notable IT law practitioner - described as being “phenomenally good”.

He is the editor of the Computer Contracts chapter of Sweet & Maxwell’s “Practical Commercial Precedents”. He is also Chairman and a committee member of the London Group of the Society for Computers and Law.

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 17

ARE YOU FUTURE PROOF? WEDNESDAY 8TH MARCH 08.30 – 09.15

REGISTRATION & BREAKFAST

9.15 – 9.30

CHAIRMEN’S WELCOME Chris Harris, MD, Lawyer Checker Tony Piccirillo, Partner, AVRillo

9.30 – 10.15

KEYNOTE ADDRESS - Where is the UK housing market heading?

Speaker announced soon

10.15 – 11.00

PANEL 1 – Client Care: Breaking down barriers Andy Foster, Panel Member, Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP) Darren Cox, Ombudsman, Legal Ombudsman Sheila Kumar, Chief Executive, Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) Graham Murphy, Product Manager, The Law Society Paula Higgins, Founder & CEO, HomeOwners Alliance

11.00 – 11.45

MORNING REFRESHMENTS

11.45 – 12.45

PANEL 2 – Managing your firm Paul Saunders, Managing Director, Legal Eye Rob Hailstone, Founder, Bold Legal Group Eddie Goldsmith, Conveyancing Association Emma Vigus, Director, Professional Indemnity, Howden UK Group Limited David Knowles, Head of Financial Crime, Paycasso

12.45 – 13.30

PANEL 3 – Innovation: shaking up the conveyancing market Mike Ockenden, Director, Thornby Associates Mark Montgomery, Customer Strategy & Marketing Director, My Home Move Additional panellists to be confirmed

13.30 – 14.30

LUNCH

14.30 – 15.30

PANEL 4 – Best Practice in Conveyancing Richard Rickwood, CEO, Friday’s Move Stephen Murray, Business Development Director, PSG Sarah Tucker, Your Move Additional panellists to be confirmed

15.30-16.20

Panel 5 - Leading the Field Tom Bridge, Director of Conveyancing, Keoghs Additional panellists to be confirmed

16.20-16.30

CLOSING REMARKS Chris Harris, MD, Lawyer Checker Tony Piccirillo, Partner, AVRillo

16.30

CLOSE

CONTACT

Sponsorship enquiries please contact Kate McKittrick | kate@charltongrant.co.uk Event enquiries please contact Ellie Campbell | ellie.campbell@charltongrant.co.uk T: 01765 600909

*programme subject to change

Etihad Stadium, Manchester

FEATURES

2016 is the year of AI, so what does this mean for the legal profession?

Katie Gibbs explains why AI is more than hype, and why the legal sector needs to prepare to adopt these technologies or risk being left behind. s I’m sure you have heard, 2016 has been the year of Artificial Intelligence. It is currently the hot topic in digital; it has seen the rise of chatbots in everyday life, as well as numerous other changes, from contesting parking tickets and finding new recipes, to the announcement that IBM Watson can diagnose cancers better than any human doctor can. Some argue that all this excitement around Artificial Intelligence is just another hype cycle, but I’m confident that the current surge of interest in AI is not just hype, and will only increase in 2017. Why? Because we are seeing AI deliver tangible and reliable benefits to business that it simply has not done before.

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Our company, Matter, is a consultancy specialising in designing new services and products with Artificial Intelligence at their core.

We have seen unprecedented interest and demand in AI services as businesses realise the value and efficiencies that it can bring.

Businesses are investing more money than ever before in AI technologies, and this is only going to increase as the technologies evolve and learn.

How far AI has come

The key reason for this surge in interest is that AI has finally reached the point where it can be applied to a range of use cases, and companies are wanting to get ahead of the game so they can reap the benefits as soon as possible. Whether it’s easing the burden of governance and compliance obligations using AI decision support tools modelled on the knowledge of experts, or developing a chatbot to answer complex customer questions, Artificial Intelligence can be applied across all industries, and the legal profession is no exception. The use of AI to determine whether a case should be taken on or not is now commonplace in large law firms, and it was recently announced that AI has been used to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to 79% accuracy.

I recently went to a talk on the impact that Artificial Intelligence will have across industries, and the majority of attendees were surprised at how far AI (and its range of uses) has come; from beating a human at the ancient game of Go and winning Jeopardy, to analysing enormous amounts of information in order to make recommendations, and harnessing sentiment analysis to understand users’ reactions. Regardless of whether this technology is being used to demonstrate its ability to win intellectual games, or to make recommendations to doctors on how to treat a medical condition, there is a need to regulate this technology and set the parameters for how we should be working with Artificial Intelligence. Which is why I see law playing a much larger part in the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the next year.

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We risk being in a position where the law and those in the legal profession are left trailing even further behind technological advances A key concern regarding the use of technology and law seems to be the assumption that judges understand the technology and software that is being used, and is increasingly becoming crucial to court cases. However, historically, judges have predominantly relied on the outcomes of external reviews and audits as evidence, rather than understanding and analysing how technologies have been developed, and the impact that this can have once implemented. This highlights a real need for the legal system to be brought up to date with the use and regulations of technology, and AI is no exception. How prepared is our legal system for such advanced technology?

AI and autonomy

When we talk about Artificial Intelligence, the topic of driverless cars is unavoidable. They’re the most publicised use of AI in the media and they hold a certain fascination in part because they are seen as the ultimate test of the limitations of AI. You will have heard that the AI system in driverless cars is learning how to make decisions in a split second when the car is placed in a dangerous situation; will it decide to hit the bus in front or the elderly woman walking on the pavement? If a child runs into the road, will it direct the car to swerve into a wall and risk the lives of the passengers? These are moral dilemmas that any of us would struggle to answer, yet we’re expecting a machine to calculate what the best outcome is. Before long, we will have cases brought against companies developing driverless cars to assess whether the AI system made the right decision in these scenarios, or whether the training data used led to a faulty output. AI is posing problems by introducing concepts that current law does not cover.

The legal system therefore needs to evolve to cover these concepts, and we need to have confidence that judges understand the technologies being used and are ready to tackle such cases where morality and technology overlap. Google, Facebook and Amazon recently announced that they have formed a council to formulate ethical rules to govern how robots and computer

December 2016

FEATURES

A Terminator-esque future is being propounded by the media, and is creating an atmosphere of fear surrounding AI and the role that it will play in the future programs should behave in the future, but why are technology providers having to step into this role? Surely our legal system should lead the way in steering how Artificial Intelligence should be regulated, as establishing clearly defined parameters will enable companies to be held accountable for how they are developing and using artificial intelligence systems.

Perceptions of AI

This would prompt a change in the public perception of AI. A key issue that we encounter when speaking to businesses about Artificial Intelligence is their perception of it; they are either extremely cynical or they have extremely high expectations of what it can do. This is in part due to the media’s overblown coverage of Artificial Intelligence, whether it’s a TV show where Artificial Intelligence becomes a sentient being, or the latest story whereby AI has been proven to be more successful than a human.

A Terminator-esque future is being propounded by the media, and is creating an atmosphere of fear surrounding AI and the role that it will play in the future. Establishing regulations for Artificial Intelligence would help calm this nervousness surrounding it in the media, as it would send a clear message that controls are in place, and companies are to be held responsible against them.

been presented to inform human decision making, thus allowing legal teams to make better decisions, quicker.

Although 2016 has been heralded as the year of Artificial Intelligence and there are examples of it being used effectively and ever more increasingly within law firms, the entire industry needs to evaluate the impact that AI will have on every aspect of our lives, and set the precedent for how this should be regulated and monitored. Otherwise, we risk being in a position where the law and those in the legal profession are left trailing even further behind technological advances. AI is being implemented in all industries to better inform human decisions and customer service, and instead of fearing for what this could mean, lawyers should embrace the speed and accuracy that Artificial Intelligence presents. After all, AI cannot develop creative legal arguments, so expert legal intervention by compassionate lawyers will still be needed.

Katie Gibbs is a Consultant at Matter, and specialises in running innovation workshops and projects, with a focus on providing insights into the application of Artificial Intelligence.

This in turn would provide the industry with the opportunity to propel the message that AI is a powerful tool that should be used to help humans make decisions and do their jobs even better, not to replace them. There is often trepidation when talking about AI, as people are wary of the impact that it will have on jobs traditionally performed by humans. AI’s have different strengths and capabilities to their human supervisors, and it’s the synergy between human and AI that is so exciting and appealing. We need to make the most of the opportunity that AI presents us with and use it to complement and inform our human actions, rather than empowering AI to take these actions on our behalf.

Practical application

In terms of the practical application of Artificial Intelligence within the legal profession, it can be used to automate tasks, streamline processes, facilitate and expedite research, flag up relevant precedents, or answer complex regulatory questions immediately and often with greater accuracy. Such tools would help free up the time that lawyers can spend on more complex, bespoke legal tasks. For example, Kim, Riverview’s virtual assistant, is designed to help legal teams make better and quicker decisions, such as suggesting the best order in which to renegotiate a series of corporate contracts. The use of AI in such examples complements human intellect and decision-making, as it streamlines arduous, time consuming processes by analysing the enormous amount of data that is available, and ensures that all relevant information has

December 2016

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 21

FEATURES

How AI will deliver law firms improved profitability AI can complete time-consuming tasks, freeing up lawyers to focus on those tasks that require the human touch. Ben Taylor discusses how this can be achieved. recent Financial Times headline declared that ‘legal firms are unleashing office automatons’. The article by Jane Croft, published on 16th May 2016, suggests that “artificial intelligence is relieving junior lawyers of time-consuming tasks.”

In other words, junior lawyers will be freed up to focus on other legal tasks that require the human touch. The argument is that by training junior lawyers to develop new skills to perform other jobs, their law practices could become more efficient and more profitable. AI therefore offers an opportunity to innovate.

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In her report, Croft cited Professor Richard Susskind, a technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice. He has apparently said, quoting Croft, that “intelligent search systems could now outperform junior lawyers and paralegals in reviewing large sets of documents and selecting the most relevant.” He believes that the legal profession has had 5 years to re-invent itself from being legal advisers to legal technologists, and he has criticised law schools for turning out 20th Century lawyers. This is because there is some reluctance in many law firms to embrace technology with the same vigor that other sectors have done. However, by embracing AI they could catch up and gain a competitive edge.

Cognitive reasoning

The key to competitive advantage lies in the use of artificial intelligence for Cognitive Reasoning. Cognitive Reasoning is a term that describes technologies that start with a structure of human knowledge, which can be applied to make rationalised judgments, at scale, without the human having to be present.

In the case of the legal sector, initial opportunities come from automated decision-making, and how AI can take human expertise and apply it to legislation, enabling lawyers to more efficiently interpret the right advice and decisions for clients.

We are already seeing examples of global law practices developing their capabilities in this area. Projects are being designed to scale expertise in a way that wasn’t previously possible, offering better efficiency and consistency. The traditional methods of performing these tasks typically require greater levels of human resource and many ‘man hours’ to deliver the same result.

The technology also gives the ability to use knowledge to deliver scalable advice, at any time of the day.

Andrew Joint, Partner – Commercial Technology Team, at law practice Kemp Little, said that these kinds of tools will help with other aspects. “Currently I would sense that most are looking at AI in law firms for activities such as M&A due diligence or litigation disclosure – document heavy reviews, involving gigabytes of documentation and large amounts of lawyer time on relatively mundane activities”, he explains, before commenting that the AI review and analysis exercise replaces what was previously being done by junior lawyers.

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Trust and adoption will increase through providing accurate and reliable recommendations that are auditable Matt Peers, Director of ISS at Linklaters, responds: “The AI heading is quite broad, but what is clear is that AI is going to play an increasingly important role in how we, and our clients, work. Our plan is to make sure that we have technology that meets the needs of the people in Linklaters, as well as those of our clients.

Furthermore, we will look to invest in technology and change our processes accordingly. The market is crowded and evolving fast, so we do not intend to be wedded to any one solution.”

Improving workflow

So how can AI improve workflow and efficiency in a law firm?

There are already examples of Cognitive Reasoning helping firms achieve this. Systems are being built that take the expertise and approach of individual lawyers, and can analyse if specific clients will be affected. This is then scaled to apply to all clients, something that would have taken hundreds of lawyer hours. To address the complexity of this kind of analysis, a sort of AIpowered triage tool can be used. With its help, law firms can run all of their clients through the system to establish who is at risk. In this scenario, AI is doing the groundwork, giving the lawyer a very good starting point for future client conversations, with high levels of transparency.

James Loft – CEO of Matter, says that form-filling is another example of where AI can help law firms to become more efficient.

He nevertheless suggests that the “question is: Are you going to stop lawyers from using paper?”

He thinks that’s unlikely to happen, but he believes that “it can help with the building of organisational knowledge, offering a brain of information that is stored by the law firm (say by digitalising documents that are in paper form).” Through this process, modern law firms can add new value to existing information and build on the knowledge of individuals.

Like Rainbird, AI technology company Matter has found that AI can also benefit the legal consumer by opening up a new avenue of advice. “Think about Robo(t) Advice, where there is legal information on pages that isn’t clear to the consumer. This can be better understood by the consumer by using natural language, and so consumers can ask questions or gain legal advice.” This can reduce costs and be used as a first port of call.

December 2016

FEATURES

Systems are being built that take the expertise and approach of individual lawyers, and can analyse if specific clients will be affected He explains that ‘Robo Advice’ is similar to ringing the NHS Direct helpline. It is not always going to be the last port of call, because the legal consumer may still need to speak with a lawyer to clarify the details of their case or situation. However, more likely, a lawyer’s judgement will be supported by details that are supplied from an initial assessment that the AI tool has already made Joint adds: “AI can potentially allow issues to be dealt with more accurately. It can make it cheaper because the work can be done more quickly. Additionally, on a practical basis when I implement an IT system, it doesn’t come with the same amount of ‘loaded costs’ compared to when I take on a lawyer as an employee. That speed and volume of performance benefit, plus other financial benefits to the law firm, means the legal consumer is likely to get quicker, and perhaps cheaper, services.”

Overcoming challenges

For AI technology to achieve wide-spread traction in law firms, there are some challenges that must be overcome. “A key part of the client/advisor relationship involves trust – typically arising via face-to-face discussions”, says Joint. Confidence and trust in the advice is important, because that’s what clients come to law firms for: spending large amounts of money on issues that may involve life-altering events.

He explains: “This is the challenge for AI and is the likely real impact of the use of AI on the legal consumer. It now takes a long time to realise you are dealing with a chat bot rather than a real person when you are messaging customer call-centres. Although we are getting quite comfortable with machines communicating with us, I’m not sure we’re completely there yet with regards to taking advice from them regarding key life decisions.”

However, Cognitive Reasoning and technologies that take human expertise as a starting point, will naturally begin to build trust, as they can support decision making by providing a justification or rationale for the answers given.

From a technology perspective, one of the biggest challenges for a law firm will be a requirement for well-tagged data to ensure that it is suitable for use in an AI system. If organised data isn’t available, the quality of the human expertise applied to a system will be key to its success.

Also, in the case of any of these technologies, consideration would need to be given to providing the knowledge resource that feeds into the system.

But the thing to note here is that you can (and should) start small.

With the modern slavery legislation example, human expertise could be encoded in less than a week with the resulting timesaving being huge. From small tests like this, it is then possible to scale it out throughout other legislation changes, working towards building a centre of excellence.

December 2016

Other sectors

Loft says that other sectors are adopting forms of AI that can also be used by the legal sector. He explains that there are a number of approaches to AI. “One is cognitive reasoning, which is used in financial services. Then you have machine learning; law firms have started to use this type of technology to decide on the viability of a case, because it can be used to make predictions as it learns, determine what has happened, and can analyse what should happen next,” says Loft.

“IBM is using Natural Language Classification for personality assessments from the way clients speak, all based on comprehensible human language”, he says, before revealing that this kind of technology is also used in call centre environments to give a personalised feel, or to avoid problems on a call. “It can be used to assess people’s emotional state to avoid any fallout. Understanding emotional intelligence better can make it a level playing field by offering a uniformed approach to how you deal with people, allowing you to structure and support the conversations”, he says.

Resistance to change

In spite of the benefits associated with the implementation of artificial intelligence in modern law firms, there remains a reluctance to adopt technology. Typically, lawyers and law firms are naturally risk averse. There’s a pressure to develop and demonstrate trust in everything they do, and the problem is that a technology they can’t see is often considered a big ‘no’ in terms of trust.

This lack of trust is putting the sector at risk of becoming behind the times. It is very people-centric, and so firms aren’t naturally inclined to implement much technology.

Loft concurs by suggesting that “Lawyers have invested many years to become highly skilled and therefore have a strong belief in their own abilities.” For AI to gain traction, lawyers need to develop a belief in the technology, which means it has to demonstrate its value. Again, trust and adoption will increase through providing accurate and reliable recommendations that are auditable.

Embrace AI

The current culture maintains lawyers sitting for hours with books and paper. A lot of this is still necessary, but a reluctant approach to adopting technologies could hinder the sector’s ability to deliver opportunities that serve their clients better, increase efficiencies, or grow profitability for a firm.

Technology is opening up opportunities for the sector that weren’t previously possible. So many of the barriers to adopting AI will eventually be overcome, bringing new capabilities to law firms, and more efficient ways to inform decision-making. Both Lawyers and clients will likely benefit from this, making more profitable relationships all round.

Ben Taylor is the CEO and founder of Artificial Intelligence company, Rainbird.

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FEATURES

The Missing Piece of the Puzzle – The Role of the Legal Engineer Catherine Bamford, Founder of BamLegal, describes the increasingly important role of the legal engineer and explains that it’s not just about being a techie.

W

hen people ask what I do, I tell them I am a legal engineer.

I am then faced with a puzzled expression or am asked, “Sorry, a what?”

I believe that with the speed by which new legal technologies are being developed and brought to market, and given the potentially huge changes these technologies will bring to the way legal services are practiced and delivered, the role of a legal engineer will become increasingly commonplace and vital within law firms.

Jonathan Patterson, Development Director of DWF LLP, describes the role of the Legal Engineer as “the missing piece of the puzzle”, and one that those in the market still do not fully understand. They think it is a purely technical job. So, what is a legal engineer really and what skills do they need to have? Let me try and explain the role by telling you a little about how I got to become one.

5 years ago, I was a rather bored and disillusioned lawyer in a large commercial firm. I was considering leaving law completely but had no idea what else to do, save for some vague notion of becoming a scuba diving instructor! So, when the opportunity came along to go on an internal secondment to help my practice area become more efficient using automation technology, I grabbed it with both hands.

I had no idea what it would involve, or if I would be any good at it, but it was a break from fee-earning for 3 months and I thought, “who knows, I might even enjoy it.” It turned out I loved it.

Entering automation

I was initially asked to automate precedents using Thomson Reuters’ Contract Express. I was always into maths at school and was surprised to discover that the simple form of coding the software required was similar to algebra. It wasn’t long until my inner geek came fully out of the closet and I would spend day and night coding up templates to create online questionnaires for the lawyers to draft their documents.

I really enjoyed working out how best to automate a tricky, multilayered section, how to get the fastest result with the fewest number of questions and how to use the software for purposes for which it was not necessarily designed. I could be truly creative again, which was liberating. I approached the firm and asked if rather than going back to fee-earning they would let me manage and roll out automation full time. Luckily, they said yes.

Having been a junior lawyer, I could see what a difference this software would make to our daily lives, by speeding up all the boring bits we didn’t go to law school to do! I was able to explain

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Although an interest and understanding of tech is essential, a legal engineer is not purely a techy to those that had not yet used it how it could help them and free them up to carry out more interesting tasks, the tasks the clients were actually paying for. This created a healthy pipeline and before long I had a brilliant team working with me, and we managed to automate the majority of the firm’s precedents.

As well as the automation, I loved having to think of different ways to ‘sell’ the ideas to the lawyers. Frequently, they would tell me how their work was so bespoke it couldn’t be automated. This was when I had to be respectful, tactful, persuasive and creative to show how in fact certain tasks could be turned around faster, more accurately and consistently. I think this aspect, the ability to sell new ideas with enthusiasm to generally sceptical and risk-averse people, is as important to the role of a legal engineer as the ability to understand technology.

Soon, our team began working on integrating the software with other available technologies, and we became part of wider knowledge management initiatives. I was very lucky to work for such an innovative firm open to ideas and change.

The Legal Engineer

However, we struggled to come up with a job title that accurately described what our team was doing. We were not technical enough to be called true programmers, yet we were no longer simply automating documents. More and more we were listening to the lawyers, designing solutions and selling the new ideas. It was one of my gurus, Orlando Conetta, who first suggested that we were in fact “Legal Knowledge Engineers”.

When I left the firm to set up BamLegal, a company that helps law firms and in-house legal departments to improve the way they deliver legal services using technology, I dropped the ‘knowledge’ part, as it was not just legal content we were helping with but in fact the whole delivery of the service. Our team of legal engineers is now growing by the day.

The term ‘Legal Knowledge Engineer’ was first coined by Richard Susskind in ‘The End of Lawyers’, 2008. He predicted that roles

December 2016

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Having been a junior lawyer I could see what a difference this software would make to our daily lives, by speeding up all the boring bits we didn’t go to law school to do would exist and indeed become prevalent in law firms of the future, as firms would require people who could combine legal knowledge with technical expertise.

Several other firms now have legal engineering roles, or roles akin to them, just with different names. In August, Stuart Barr of HighQ wrote a fantastic article entitled “The Rise of the Legal Engineer”, and defined a Legal Engineer as “the interface between legal experts and technology experts – they get both sides of the equation”. I agree with this definition. However, I think the role is much, much more.

Introducing and understanding

Dealing with lawyers is tricky. They do not like business speak or IT language. I have seen legal process mappers lose a room of lawyers instantly, upon uttering phrases like ‘work packages’.

Project managers are taught that communication is key, but trying to get 6 partners on a weekly conference call to run through a project plan is not the way to get them onboard, and when folk from the IT department start speaking about SQL or APIs to a bunch of lawyers, the two sets look at each other like they are from different planets. Now that firms are being asked to embrace AI engines, the gap could get even wider.

A legal engineer must use their legal background and understanding of the pressures lawyers are under to make the process of re-engineering and improving the way they carry out legal matters using these new technologies as pain free as possible for them. They need to capture the lawyers’ requirements and then translate these to the programmers or software providers in a way that will not require lots of clarification and hundreds of rounds of correcting between both parties.

essential for the role. I believe it is. To successfully re-engineer a legal process or service, to truly understand the problem, to be able to identify the key variables, to see how it could be done better without over complicating things, and to then get the lawyers to use it, it really helps if you have been in their shoes and can speak their language.

When I asked Jonathan Patterson what he thought a Legal Engineer was, he described “an individual with a hybrid skill set that can translate legal knowledge, processes and technology into commercial solutions”. He went on to say that he still thinks people don’t quite get it though, that it also involves what he calls “lawyer whispering”, which is having empathy and being able to get engagement as well as being a designer and developer of legal solutions. Drew Winlaw of exciting new law firm Wavelength.law suggests bravery, imagination and pragmatism are also some of the key traits.

Therefore, although an interest and understanding of tech is essential, a legal engineer is not purely a techy. Look for those with a legal background and a flair for selling; creative people who can consult, problem solve, project manage and facilitate. A legal engineer may well be your firm’s missing piece to the puzzle.

Catherine Bamford is the Founder of BAM Legal.

The growing use of AI in law to speed up due diligence and contract risk evaluations is a perfect example. Regularly, I attend demos by the Legal AI software companies with a client. The software company show what their incredible technology is capable of, but once they have left the room the client turns to me bamboozled and asks, “OK, so we know it’s good, but how do we use it? Where would we start? It sounds like a lot of work to get set up. The lawyers don’t have time!” This is where the legal engineer comes in.

Connecting the dots, explaining the use cases, spending the time translating and developing the solution with the software company, putting in the hours that the lawyers do not have to identify the variables to be extracted, explaining why and when.

More than a techie

There is some argument as to whether a legal background is

December 2016

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 25

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Improving the craft of conveyancing Hugo-Pickford Wardle discusses why he feels the conveyancing process is ripe for automation and how doing so could improve the system for conveyancers and their clients, and have implications for the entire law profession.

Y

ou already use Artificial intelligence every day, whether you are using Google maps, driving your new car or trading stocks.

What’s changed very recently is that Artificial Intelligence technology has become commercially viable to use in any business context you can imagine, and a lot of people are waking up to legal being a prime use for this technology.

I saw first-hand how broken the conveyancing process is in the UK. This, I decided, is the perfect place to apply this new technology

Back in 2008 I worked with Practical Law to put the UK legislation onto an iPad. We saw reluctance to make this change, even when the benefit was clear.

Let’s start with big data.

Now, the innovation of AI is redefining the role of a lawyer, even replacing lawyers. Given my previous experience of the legal profession’s lack of acceptance of a solution that would make their life easier, I struggle to see wholesale adoption of a technology that will require them to rethink their business from the ground up.

The application of technology in the legal space is currently so underdeveloped, just starting with the ability for tech to crunch large volumes of data to take the dull grunt work away from junior lawyers is where AI has started to gain traction in the legal space. Organisations such as ROSS and RAVN are helping commercial firms build these types of tools, saving time and money for their clients.

As an entrepreneur, that excites me. We see that AI can be used to create an experience that fundamentally changes the way customers interact with legal services, and we’re betting that traditional legal organisations will have their Uber moment sooner, rather than later, if they wake up to this.

However, consolidating an industry into one enormous corporation in the way Uber has done is not the path to a better world, or even a better customer experience. At FastMove we are working on an AI solution that will let conveyancers focus on the craft of conveyancing, rather than administration, that will ultimately enable them to manage more cases with the same number of employees.

By taking this approach of replacing the unappealing aspects of conveyancing work with AI and augmenting the fulfilling work with fantastic 21st century tools, we think that we can change the conveyancing industry.

We’re starting to trial this approach in spring 2017 and so if you’d be interested in getting involved in the future of conveyancing, please get in touch.

The lawyer’s view

AI and the law. It’s not all about robot lawyers (but watch this space).

Apparently, all lawyers will soon be out of work, replaced by an army of metropolis style robots, marching onwards and overthrowing their human counterparts. Well, probably not, but there are numerous areas where tech can help deliver legal services, and lawyers are well advised to embrace these to ensure that the services they provide to their clients is modern, efficient and provides value.

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The applications to retail legal services, traditional ‘high street’ work, have, however, been stubbornly underdeveloped, despite numerous obvious applications. For instance, imagine that when a divorce client wants to know, based on their circumstances and assets, what they’ll walk away with, and whether they will keep their house. Rather than lawyers just relying on experience to provide an answer, they can harness the power and accuracy of a system that has pulled data from all of the divorce settlements over the last 20 years (that’s approximately 2 million by the way) in order to advise their client. These systems are already being looked at in other jurisdictions, and it is naive to think that it won’t form part of how law is delivered and consumed in the UK. So what about predictive law? What if you knew your client’s problems before they did?

Aside from the obvious benefits of this as a client capture tool, imagine the enhanced level of customer service this could deliver.

The emerging discipline of predictive law is already working on this. Conveyancing is the obvious target area and we have already scoped out and built tools that will crunch data looking at life events and move triggers to accurately predict when different demographics will be moving up the property chain.

Lawyers invented blockchain

Blockchain is the new buzzword and it has just started to hit law. Very broadly speaking it can be described as a big audit trail in the sky.

But wasn’t this concept invented by lawyers hundreds of years ago? Pre-land registration, epitomes of title sought to provide exactly such an audit trail to prove ownership and good and

December 2016

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These systems are already being looked at in other jurisdictions, and it is naive to think that it won’t form part of how law is delivered and consumed in the UK marketable title, free from encumbrances. Blockchain will rely on the same basic principles, and unsurprisingly it is already being explored. Blockchain supported systems are already being built in Sweden to underpin their conveyancing systems.

The next step for blockchain is to overlay smart contracts: contracts automatically completed based upon a series of parameters being reached. Can we expect the system of release and exchange of contracts to disappear over the coming years, replaced by smart contracts? Very possibly.

Beware the robot lawyers?

Can we expect to be ousted from our desks by AI? Ultimately the cognitive power of AI will not only be able to data crunch and facilitate client self-service, but it will also be able to interpret that information, take decisions and advise clients of appropriate next steps and outcomes.

We are currently developing ‘Buddy’, our AI conveyancer, who will not only facilitate home movers managing the entire process via their smart phones, but will also assimilate contract packs and recognise which enquiries need to be raised and answered based on the contents of those documents. Buddy will also provide home movers with access to services and tools beyond legal services.

The emergence of blockchain and smart contracts means that ultimately we expect Buddy to be able to manage the entire endto-end process. The tech will be ready, the question is: will the profession be ready?

As Professor Susskind says, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. The only question for lawyers is: when are you you going to get on board?

The innovator’s view AI Is already here.

Artificial Intelligence is not something new.

The biggest change is the cost of fast computing power has massively decreased, driven by companies such as AWS. This has resulted in cloud computing infrastructure that can support the sort of calculations that are needed for AI to work.

something seemingly impossible even a year earlier. Even with the massive benefit of not needing to carry a ton of books around, we still encountered a lot of reluctance to making this change.

Now, the question is not ‘if’ there is an opportunity to revolutionise the legal industry, but ‘who’ is going to take it? My bet is that lawyers will need help seizing the opportunity in front of them.

Applications in conveyancing

As artificial intelligence became the hot topic, I sold my house and bought another. I saw first-hand how broken the conveyancing process is in the UK. This, I decided, is the perfect place to apply this new technology.

The first thing I do when looking at an idea in a new industry is to do the research. I talk to the experts and read magazines and laws, and for the conveyancing industry this includes the very exciting Mortgage Lenders Handbook. As I dug into the conveyancing process in more detail, I was told over and over again how complicated it was. That there is no perfect path through a conveyancing process, that there’s always an edge-case.

That it always depends on the slowest party in the chain, and most interestingly that several conveyancing firms have already automated the whole process.

As an Innovation consultant, this is the same feedback I have always had when suggesting change. That whichever industry I’m looking into is different.

Of course, I don’t want to become a conveyancer. And neither do I want to become a service provider to make the conveyancing process 5% better. So, instead I’ll offer an alternative approach.

I have an offer for conveyancers. I’ll cut your case work in half, so you can do twice as many cases with the same resources.

I’ll deliver to you all the documents you need from the client, including questions answered by the client that we predict as being relevant to the conveyancing.

You will then be able to focus on the craft of the conveyancing, rather than the administration. Promise to make customers home moves stress free, and I’ll do this for you.

Will lawyers be able to seize the opportunity?

Join us. If you’re a forward-thinking conveyancer we’d love you to join our trial in 2017, so please get in touch.

People are waking up to legal being the prime use for this new wave of technological implementation.

Hugo Pickford-Wardle is the Founder of FastMove, applying AI to conveyancing.

When I worked with Practical Law to put the UK legislation onto an iPad in 2008, this was highly innovative, using new technology to do

December 2016

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 27

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I wouldn’t start from here…

Building a sustainable AI solution from the inside out

I

“

wouldn’t start from here …”

We’re often struck, inevitably unfairly on occasions, by a similar thought when we either read about the current and potential use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the legal market or discuss developments with potential customers or solutions providers.

We are believers

Putting to one side the challenge that AI means many different things to many different people, I should state right up front that we are believers. We have absolutely no doubt that AI and related technology trends will have a significant impact on all markets and value chains. The legal market, globally, is not immune from this.

As a result, the Riverview Law Board has placed its bets and organised Riverview Law accordingly. We have invested millions of pounds in Kim, our New Jersey-based knowledge automation and workflow platform.

Kim is a virtual assistant to knowledge workers in all sectors.

Through its no-code configuration model, Kim enables knowledge workers, including lawyers, to take control of their critical business processes and work to make better and quicker decisions. Kim does this by utilising its patent pending artificial intelligence, assimilation and, critically, data management capabilities. We believe that the direction of travel is clear, even if timing is unpredictable, and have acted accordingly.

It is from this position of belief that we have what is hopefully a helpful reflection. From much of the activity that we see in the legal market we suspect that, with exceptions, many organisations are starting their AI journey from the wrong place. We sense that much energy, money and time is being (and will be) wasted chasing fashion-driven AI solutions, rather than proper investment, problem solving and experimentation. Indeed, much of the effort we see in this area can be put in the ‘being seen to be doing something’ box. At the end of such a process, the inevitable happens. Expectations are disappointed. The technology is blamed. Future investments are delayed or shelved.

This chain of events is potentially life-threatening to organisations.

Failure to understand and ride the current data, IT and AI wave, over time, risks all. It is a bet the firm issue, particularly if the wrong or no bets are placed!

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The irony in legal is that the risks can be reduced and the opportunities of success increased by learning from other industries, and in particular from house builders Given the technological and data revolution we are living through, inaction is highly dangerous. But the irony in legal is that the risks can be reduced and the opportunities of success increased by learning from other industries, and in particular from house builders.

We can learn a lot from house builders

Typically, you would not build a house from the roof down. But that is what we see happening (with exceptions, e.g. Allen & Overy, Vodafone, Securitas and Barclays) in many law firms and organisations. There is a temptation to seek instant solutions.

Under pressure to respond to noise and market trends, companies appear to be trying to put the AI roof on the house without building or re-constructing the foundations, walls and floors first.

By the way, we recognise this process because this is exactly what we tried to do when we started our AI journey in 2013, and we learnt many interesting lessons, which is why the house building analogy resonates so strongly with us now.

If you have ever watched a house being built from scratch, two things will probably have struck you. Firstly, a long time seems to pass with very little progress being made even though there is a full building crew on-site. Then, suddenly, when the foundations are finished, the house takes shape remarkably quickly. One morning the site was just concrete foundations and ground works, and the next day the house starts to emerge, proudly, from its rock-solid foundations. It is almost as if it is saying, “I was always here but you couldn’t see me”.

Secondly, in those weeks when you saw little progress being made, you were also surprised by how small the building footprint was. Clearly, a relatively small house is being built on the plot. But, when the house starts going up, you are amazed by how big it actually is given how small the foundations and footprint looked.

December 2016

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Through its no-code configuration model, Kim enables knowledge workers, including lawyers, to take control of their critical business processes and work to make better and quicker decisions This is where the fundamental role played by the foundations comes into play. In the house that has been built, there are many different rooms; lounge, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms and bathroom, etc. The four bedrooms are all different, in shape, decoration and furniture. But, critically, all the rooms, with their different functions and designs, are built on the same foundations.

UK are subject to the same laws and regulations, but even with this common environment each bank has a different language (dictionary), risk appetite, business model, data layer, etc., and context is organisationally specific. This is where Kim comes into its own.

Enabling a sustainable legal AI solution

Building this ‘Foundational Data and Context Layer’ is not easy.

The foundations represent the very hard but invaluable yards that need to be navigated.

Think of this analogy in the context of building a sustainable legal (or indeed any) AI solution. Before building the AI roof it is important to put solid and durable foundations in place; (i) the data-layer, (ii) workflow and process automation and (iii) reporting and dashboards. Combined, we call this the Foundational Data and Context Layer. Using the instruction and triage process as an example, the legal data layer will include data points that show:

• Who the instruction came from; • What business unit they are in; • What the work type is; • What the urgency of the work is; • Whether the instruction is complete; • When we received the instruction; • Who we allocated it to; • What its current status is; • How long each stage of the work took … etc.

This is the foundational data layer upon which the workflow process and the real time and trend data is built.

Continuing the analogy, with these triage foundations in place, which are relevant to all legal work types, it is relatively easy to build the equivalent of the walls, floors and rooms in a house.

Rather than the lounge, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms we have contract management, litigation, employment, property, IP; different work types built on the same foundational data layer with their own context (their subject matter data layer) on top.

The hard yards

Like that new house build, we have spent a long time creating our foundations. We now have the Riverview Law ‘Foundational Data and Context Layer’ built in Kim. It enables us to execute at a pace that we never thought possible. A bit like those comedians who appear on television and become overnight successes after they have spent ten years learning their trade on the club circuit, we have now done our club tour and can go global with Kim. We have made many mistakes along the way, particularly in our early 2013 ‘fashion’ phase, but the last year has vindicated all the emotional energy, money and time invested.

Place your bets

One of my friends, who is a technology expert, recently said to me – “There is no AI magic wand… yet.” The emphasis on ‘yet’ is important. The direction of travel is clear. Create your ‘Foundational Data and Context Layer’ and place your bets.

Karl Chapman is Chief Executive of Riverview Law and Chairman of Kim.

With the foundations, walls, floors and rooms built, it is now easier to both enable existing third party AI solutions and build tailored AI solutions using tools like Kim. To build context from the inside out, not the outside in. To create context from the foundational layer up rather than by trying to ingest a huge corpus and then infer context. The latter approach works well with a global corpus such as diseases. It struggles when context differs by jurisdiction, geography, work type and organisation. For example, banks in the

December 2016

Artificial Intelligence Supplement 29

CASE STUDY

Case Study: Business to Consumer, AI to Human M

atter developed two proof of concepts for a client earlier this year, to demonstrate how AI solutions can add value to their customer support systems.

The first POC was a Chatbot to demonstrate that an AI system can interact with users to generate accurate responses to their questions, and direct them to the correct place for expedient support if not.

The development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications is challenging, because computers traditionally require humans to “speak” to them in a programming language that is precise. However, human speech is ambiguous and the linguistic structure depends on many complex variables including slang, regional dialects and social context. Our POC needed to have this range of understanding around how people speak, but also needed to be capable of evolving as language does, in order to continue to have value.

To start the Chatbot’s learning process, training data was required in the form of actual customer questions and the answers provided by the human advisors. As customers often ask the same question in different ways, we needed to provide the Chatbot with a number of variants so it could compare, associate and correlate these different versions of the same question. The bot also examined patterns in data to improve understanding of the questions and their associated answers.

The degree of accuracy quickly improved the more times it was trialed, along with validation feedback regarding the helpfulness of the answer. This training continued until the system was ready for more information to further improve and correct any inaccurate learning; consuming a new set of training data from real life webchat scenarios, so it could continue to grow its knowledge and reply with ever-increasing degrees of accuracy.

By undertaking this cycle of events, the Chatbot demonstrated how it improves and increases its knowledge so as to deliver appropriate answers. The advantage of NLP is that it can be trained from limited real life data to be able to speak the language of customers, and convert this to meet the language of your systems and processes.

The second POC was a Procedures and Instruction Search to demonstrate the power of AI in the co-ordination and retrieval of information from internal systems, so that team members are able to better answer queries and, as a result, better serve customers.

With vast amounts of information being deemed valuable to support employees and customers, grouped with the necessity of providing a correct answer, it is no longer practical to serve information up through traditional search methods with any degree of efficiency or success.

Traditional search relies on matching search results to the specific keywords entered, whereas the Matter search solution was able to learn a huge amount of information by ingesting text from a number of sources, pulling out keywords, identifying entities and understanding taxonomies. The system also assessed sentiment in the text and gave each entity a score for its relevance based on a number of factors. These factors included references across documents and the topic it was searching. Relevance played a large part in the work carried out, as we were looking at a combination of topics or types of information. Therefore, the relevance and ranking added a further level of intelligence where the system could not only identify information and understand it, but also provide relevance to both the topic it covers and other related topics.

The main advantage of introducing an AI bot is that it very quickly becomes a subject matter expert in the topics it has been trained on. Unlike humans, it retains and remembers everything it has learnt or accessed through training data. In complex sets of data such as this, an AI enhanced system means that all information is available and relevant, rather than recent and available, in a timely manner to best serve the user.

Matter is an independent consultancy without allegiance to any product vendor, ensuring the best fit for purpose should a particular product provide value to a client’s solution needs.

We are focused on delivering outstanding customer experiences and building solutions in line with their experiential elements to make them both usable and engaging. An AI system is working well when it is invisible to the user, and therefore requires a great experience to support success.

For this client’s POCs we used:

The main advantage of introducing an AI bot is that it very quickly becomes a subject matter expert in the topics it has been trained on

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• IBM Watson Dialog • IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier • Rainbird AI • IBM Watson Retrieve & Rank • Alchemy API Russell Goldie is the Director of Client Engagement at Matter and is passionate about improving his clients’ efficiencies. For further information phone 020 8242 4300, or visit experiencematter.co.uk

December 2016

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