The future is now! Dentons, LLP, the multinational firm boasting the largest number of lawyers in the world, apparently needs more of them — of the electro-mechanical sort. Dentons is financially backing a group of students from the University of Toronto who, as a class project, created an artificial intelligence to perform legal research. Code-named Ross, the AI uses IBM’s Jeopardy-nailing Watson to scour massive amounts of case law and legal docs in seconds to produce answers to legal questions. A Siri for lawyers, as the student-startup founders describe it.

Dentons is not new to embracing legal technology. It has its own legal tech lab, called Nextlaw Labs in California, where it apparently cooks up new legal technology projects. The student start-up, known as Ross Intelligence, Inc., will get access to the labs for their work, along with the financial investment from Dentons. Dentons, through Nextlaw, is also in the process of rolling out a cloud-based platform for lawyers, employing the IBM cloud and BlueMix Cloud Foundry technology. The idea is to create the foundation for developers to leverage and enter the legal tech market in order to create even better products for legal consumers to manage their work.

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