Innovators or Luddites? Legal May Be Leading the Way in AI
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This week in AI, we do away with the idea of lawyers being behind the times and focus on legislators, regulators and litigators forging ahead.
Lawyers are often perceived as taking an antiquated view toward their practice, taking comfort in the simplicity of boxes packed to the brim with papers and teams of reviewers tediously scanning each one for information relevant to the case. This comfort, so the generality goes, evokes an adverse response to technologies and vendors promising tools that can scan thousands of documents in a matter of minutes with 90-something percent accuracy.
As the legal technology industry matures, however, it appears that this widely held view of the lawyer-as-luddite may not paint an accurate picture of many of today’s legal professionals.
A first step in combating the stereotype is to consider some of the strides being made by law firms worldwide. In the United States and abroad, firms are increasingly turning toward artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the application of machine learning to reviewing massive document sets and research decades of case law.
For example, it was recently announced that in Ireland, law firm McCann Fitzgerald is investing in AI technology for transactions in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and corporate finance. As reported in the Global Legal Post, the firm is the first in Ireland “to deploy this technology,” using Kira software. Barry Devereux, managing partner at McCann Fitzgerald, told The Australian Lawyer, “The market for legal services is evolving at a considerable pace,” and in rendering itself competitive for the future, the firm is trying to develop processes “to be at the forefront of this progress.”
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