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.
Q
Do you ever see AI completely replacing legal professionals, or will there always need to be a human element?
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08 Artificial Intelligence Supplement
A
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.
December 2016