Cognitive computing is already helping doctors, scientists, economists and investors—and now it’s going to law school.

We live in a world increasingly run by algorithms. They drive the lion’s share of all equity trades and automate complex hedges and derivatives. They make love matches, set retail prices, sequence traffic lights and air traffic, predict ticket sales by “reading” scripts, diagnose diseases, prescribe drug protocols and identify suspected terrorists for no-fly lists. At Google, they’re learning to drive, which could eventually prevent tens of thousands of highway deaths every year.

Algorithms are critical to most of the things we now call smart, like cars and phones and grids. And they’ve made computers so smart we need a new word for them. About the only thing these “computers” have in common with what’s on your desk are silicon chips.

Their processors are called “neuromorphic” because they mimic the human nervous system, just as the latest “neural network” algorithm does. As a result, these “computers” can see, speak, listen, think and learn. Given certain questions and problems, particularly those relying on perfect memory and lightning speed with massive amounts of data, they are helping to make major advances in fields ranging from economics and engineering to medicine and basic science.

And now they’re getting around to lawyers.

Later this year, a small Canadian company is scheduled to introduce its “digital legal advisor” to the world’s law firms. Its name is ROSS (which actually doesn’t stand for anything). “The way you interact with ROSS is very simple,” says Jimoh Ovbiagele, one the co-founders. “You just ask it a question as you would ask another human being. This is very different from current legal research technologies where you type in keywords and it retrieves documents that have those keywords. ROSS doesn’t retrieve thousands of documents for you to sift through. It gives you an evidence-based response.”

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