court opinions and make that data available for legal algorithms to read and train on. He has helped lead the CaseLaw Access Project, an effort to digitize the entire historical record of U.S. In total, they compiled over five million contracts.Īdam Ziegler, the managing director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, wants to remove this barrier to entry. But that wasn’t enough-the company also had to strike deals with law firms to gain access to their private repositories. In order to train its program, a team of developers built their own database of terms and conditions by collecting examples from major websites. Take the contract analysis company Legal Robot. Chief among them is a lack of accessible data to use in training the software. There are, however, still obstacles to further adoption of AI in the legal profession.
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“Although imperfect, this software is quite effective, and drastically cuts down on the time spent performing document review-a task generally given to entry-level associates at larger national firms,” Moeini says. Arman Moeini, a recent law school graduate and now an associate attorney, had the chance to use electronic discovery software while at the University of Florida. Harvard, for example, offers courses in legal innovation and programming for lawyers.
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Law schools have recognized the trend and are beginning to adapt: many have created new programs to teach the next generation of lawyers how to use these platforms and speak intelligently to the people building them. Overall, it’s been a banner year for new legal tech companies, with funding up 43 percent in the first three quarters of 2017 compared with the same time last year, according to a report by the research firm CB Insights. Meanwhile, investors plowed $96 million into Zapproved, a startup that makes a cloud-based electronic discovery tool. Kira Systems, which makes a contract review platform, counts four of the top 10 American law firms, as well as several international firms, as clients. Other legal tech startups with AI at their core have been gaining steam as well. The company has already racked up hundreds of paying customers in Asia and the Americas, and it has plans to open up shop in the U.K. “If they are handling a couple cases at a time, they will learn the law faster.” Make them more prolific,” says CaseMine’s founder, Aniruddha Yadav. “I think it will help make better lawyers faster. The system takes an uploaded brief and suggests changes to make it more authoritative, while providing additional documents that can strengthen a lawyer’s arguments. CaseMine, a legal technology company based in India, builds on document discovery software with what it calls its “virtual associate,” CaseIQ. Document-based grunt work is typically a key training ground for first-year associate lawyers, and AI-based products are already stepping in. People fresh out of law school won’t be spared the impact of automation either. As their standard responsibilities are increasingly taken over by machines, paralegals must find ways to work alongside the technology, or they are likely become a rare breed. That task typically fell to paralegals, vital members of any legal practice who usually do not have a law degree. Workers used to have to trudge through stacks of dusty law books and case files to find relevant information. These programs are, simply put, changing the way legal research is carried out.