The most important AI-related technology for the legal industry is natural language processing. This refers to the ability of computers to recognize not just the mechanics but the meaning of written and spoken language, especially in the context of documents as a whole. A number of tech startups provide law firms with compelling products that employ natural language processing.
Ravel Law is a startup that offers a case analytics tool that analyzes the language contained in case law and allows attorneys to quickly find not only cases similar to theirs, but also other cases that cite those similar cases. To this end, Ravel is sponsoring a major effort to scan the entire print collection of court decisions at the Harvard Law Library — some 40 million pages — and convert it into machine-readable text.
Ravel also allows attorneys to analyze an individual judge’s case history. Users can understand which cases and judges a certain judge finds most persuasive, as well as the rules and language that are commonly found in their cited cases.
