Helping lawyers reduce research time is key to the functioning of Ross, the students said. All teams were given access to Watson on the cloud, which allowed them to feed the computer program large amounts of text from Ontario corporate law decisions and statutes as reference material.

The super computer Watson then processed that information and the students’ application, Ross, made that data accessible to lawyers and legal researchers. Ross can, for example, predict the outcome of court cases, suggest readings or answer a wide variety of legal precedent questions, at any point in a legal process. It even provides a percentage number rating how confident it is on the accuracy of search results. Ross also alerts the user to new cases or results on their smart phone.

According to the inventors, Ross takes seconds to spit out legal research that might take others hours to gather.

“Lawyers could use Ross’ artificial intelligence to transform the practice of law, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve,” said Venkat.

The student inventors warn, though, that Ross doesn’t make lawyers unnecessary; it’s just that clients may need to hire fewer of them.

See the demo video below:

Read original article


Tags: