The legal industry gets smart about artificial intelligence.

In my top 10 list last year, I considered it big news that AI had come to legal research in the form of ROSS Intelligence, a startup that uses IBM’s Watson platform to answer lawyers’ natural-language legal research questions. Just as last year closed out, another AI company, Premonition — which says it is applying AI to the largest legal database in the world — announced a seed round at a $100 million valuation.

In 2016, AI in legal grew by leaps and bounds. The year started with the announcement by none other than legal-research giant Thomson Reuters that it was getting into the AI game, using the IBM Watson technology to develop products specific to the legal vertical. At the time, it said it would be rolling out the first of these products in beta by the second half of the year. This week, a TR spokesperson confirmed it is currently testing a beta AI product with nine customers with the goal of launching the product by the middle of 2017. While details of the product remain sketchy, the spokesperson said it targets the regulatory space and will greatly simplify several common and complicated workflows.

Then, in a notable development in March, Deloitte and Kira Systems announced an alliance “to bring the power of machine learning to the workplace, an innovation that could help free workers from the tedium of reviewing contracts and other documents.” From there, it was a year full of AI news – an AI tool to help diagram intricate corporate structures, a self-service AI portal where law firms can configure custom AI tasks, and more.

Meanwhile, ROSS has gone from clever idea to actual product, signing deals in 2016 with several major law firms, including Baker & Hostetler, Latham & Watkins, von Briesen & Roper and Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice.

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