The jury is still out on the role to be played by artificial intelligence in law. As a recent New York Times article observed about IBM’s attempts to commercialize its Watson AI computer, “[C]ommercializing new technology, however promising, typically comes in short steps rather than giant leaps.”

That said, there was a notable leap this week when Deloitte and Kira Systems announced an alliance “to bring the power of machine learning to the workplace, an innovation that could help free workers from the tedium of reviewing contracts and other documents.”

I wrote about Kira in 2014, when it was called DiligenceEngine. It is a system for using machine learning to perform due diligence and contract analysis, tedious review tasks typically relegated to large-firm corporate associates. It automates the extraction and analysis of key contract provisions, with the goal of enabling faster and more accurate review.

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“Artificial intelligence has arrived to a point where machines can scale human expertise by extracting information from complex documents,” Waisberg said. “It accurately identifies information by learning from examples versus just reflexively identifying pre-programmed clauses.”

I noted not long ago that Thomson Reuters is using Watson to develop an AI product for lawyers. In point of fact, there are any number of projects working to enhance the use of AI in law practice. The future of law indisputably involves AI, and the Deloitte-Kira announcement is further evidence that that future is already here.

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