The Future Of Law And Technology
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DL: How far do you think we can go in automating the work of lawyers and when are we going to reach that point?
DP: That’s a big question—one that a lot of people are thinking about. The conversation of the next ten years is going to be about machine learning. Every strong legal R&D team understands algorithms and machine learning, and everyone is attacking automation. One of the essential functions of a lawyer is spotting issues, and we don’t yet know the extent to which all legal issues can be spotted and resolved without humans. That might be the key unresolved question for the future of the profession and technology’s role in it. At Bloomberg Law, we have developed algorithms that can extract the legal principles of a case, without any human review or intervention. The question is how fast we can refine, expand and perfect those algorithms, and how broadly we can apply them and incorporate them into workflows that lawyers need in order to pick up where the technology leaves off.
As to how quickly that future is going to get here, it won’t be tomorrow. Leaders coming of age now (myself included) are not full “digital natives,” but the next generation of leaders will be. I expect that when that group begins taking the mantle in a decade or so, change will accelerate even faster.
Bloomberg BNA logoDL: I suspect we’ll hear a lot at the ILTA conference about “Big Data” and its implications for the legal space. How is Bloomberg BNA’s technology making use of Big Data?
DP: Law is an enormous unstructured data set. Consequently, lawyers have operated with big data for years. But what we are now seeing is lawyers and legal professionals looking for answers from that data. Instead of trying to figure out what the law is (we’ve solved that), we are now looking at how to best position our facts, our deal, our case or our contract to increase the odds of success for the client. We are now using the data to predict likely outcomes and, thereby, to influence our behavior – where should I file, what should I ask for, etc.
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