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Faster, Cheaper, Smarter THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN E-DISCOVERY By Ajith Samuel
Today, when we hear about technology firms “disrupting” existing industries, most often those disruptions are powered by AI. Navigation systems analyze roads, traffic patterns and data from drivers to recommend the fastest route home or to work, while also laying the foundation for future fleets of self-driving cars. Companies like Uber and Lyft combine these navigation systems with networks of drivers and individuals seeking rides. Netflix and Amazon analyze vast pools of viewer and consumer behavior to recommend entertainment options and purchases. In the coming decade, AI will fundamentally transform all aspects of our economy. Despite its notoriously technologyaverse nature, the legal profession will not be spared. In fact, AI is already making deep inroads into the law. The rise of AI in legal technology began during the document review phase of electronic discovery. A time-intensive endeavor requiring large
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y nature, technological innovations give rise to new industries, but truly revolutionary technologies do not just create new industries. They transform the world, fundamentally altering wide swathes of the existing business and industrial landscape. Approximately 150 years ago, the western industrial landscape was fundamentally changed by harnessing electricity. Machines could operate faster, cleaner, and more powerfully. The workday was extended, allowing factories to operate two and three times longer every day. Manual tasks were automated. According to Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, artificial intelligence (AI) is the new electricity. “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago,” he explains, “today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.”
numbers of trained attorneys, document review was by far the most expensive phase of the discovery process, averaging over 70 percent of the costs associated with pre-trial discovery. Technologies such as predictive coding, in which algorithms learned from “seed sets” of documents coded by human reviewers, provided fast, accurate and less expensive means for legal teams to work through a vast body of potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI). AI has spread widely out of document review in the past decade, adding tasks like contract review and management, case law review, and even simple legal services such as disputing parking violations to its purview. And it continues to tackle new tasks, making forays into predicting case outcomes, sentencing, and more. In short, legal technology vendors, law firms and legal teams have a clear mandate: Innovate or be left behind. No less an authority than Gartner Analytics estimates that 80 percent of emerging technologies will be built on a foundation of AI by 2021. As with many new technologies driven by advances in engineering, it’s important to ask if AI is a solution in search of a problem. In the legal area in general, and in e-discovery in particular, it is not. Five years ago, legal industry revenue was over $250 billion in the United States; today it is rapidly approaching $300 billion. Similarly, the costs of e-discovery continue to rise, as every advance in technology is seemingly offset by increasing data volumes. Depending on your source, the e-discovery software and services market is between $10 billion and $12 billion today and will likely reach $18 billion to $20 billion within five years. Much as it was 15 years ago, when the e-discovery industry was born, it costs too
