The machines have already consolidated their gains in automated industries and are continuing their migration into white-collar work. Artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing, the “next generation” of computing, will render most paperwork (and pushers of paper) redundant. Even contracts, the bread and butter of most lawyers, will be automated—there are already small-scale examples of self-executing “smart contracts.”

In terms of litigation, not only are computers demonstrating pretty good batting averages in predicting case outcomes (the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights were recently predicted at 79 per cent accuracy using AI) but they are also pretty good at predicting your personal batting average. That’s right—there’s at least one service (Premonition Analytics) that uses AI, predictive analytics and data mining to figure out which lawyers win the most before which judge.

There’s also Lex Machina, which mines litigation data to generate insights about judges, lawyers, parties and case subjects. Law firms use it to land new clients and win lawsuits. In-house counsel use it to manage outside counsel and set litigation strategy.

In-house counsel are embracing innovation primarily to drive price down. The next step is to enhance processes. In other words, improve legal processes to make legal work flow better. For instance, my firm is working to automate the client interface—think portals and dashboards. We already do large-scale process reengineering work (e.g., ever wonder how many hands in your organization touch that contract during its lifespan and whether they all really need to?) and have had sophisticated project management tools in place for some time.

In-house counsel are also redefining what is truly legal work. This a significant direction in which legal innovation is headed. Once legal services are unbundled, you would be surprised at the number of things that don’t actually need a lawyer.

A good example of this is the information-gathering phase of a file. Much of this can be done internally (and often remotely) under the guidance of lawyers. This reduces disruption for clients, and increases our own relevance and credibility in areas that truly matter.

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