By Tucker Cottingham
It's easy to imagine a post-apocalyptic future where machines take over the world. We can quickly paint the mental picture of a dusty, deserted city dotted with smashed cars and trash fires; drones patrolling overhead using infrared sensors to ferret out living beings. The scene cuts to a poorly lit underground colony of humans at the end of their rope, tired and weathered from the relentless and seemingly futile resistance they’ve been organizing against an all-knowing machine consciousness -- the last drops of hope and romance just barely still within reach.
It’s easy to imagine the scene because we’ve been seeing it for 20 years. We’ve been watching movies, playing video games, and reading sci-fi warnings from pop-scientists about Skynet since 1985, not to mention Elon Musk.
Today, many lawyers still have negative or threatening associations with “artificial intelligence.” Often, this sentiment is encouraged by alarmist news headlines. For example, Axios published an article titled Artificial Intelligence is Coming for Lawyers. Another study by Deloitte advertises that more than 100,000 legal jobs will be replaced in the next 20 years.
As an attorney and CEO of a company that builds A.I. drafting tools for thousands of lawyers, I find this recent phenomenon fascinating. While many attorneys are adopting helpful tools in order to provide better legal services, some attorneys are no doubt providing lower quality legal services than they could because they are afraid of what they think artificial intelligence represents. This is like an accountant being afraid of a calculator. By leveraging A.I., lawyers have the ability to streamline repetitive tasks and reduce errors, which in turn opens up more time to spend with clients and more time for legal work. For example, if you want to enter a client’s name and address 10 times across multiple documents, you only need to enter it one time and it will populate across all of the documents. We have turned all of the state and county documents in California into intelligent forms that can be easily populated, edited, signed and filed.
Our understanding of AI is at an inflection point. I propose that as attorneys, we remove our associations of A.I. from the dehumanizing and apocalyptic vision of sci-fi movies and alarmist headlines and instead, anchor artificial intelligence in its useful present-day applications. A word can only become meaningful when the relationship between the word and the concept it represents are agreed upon. In this sense, artificial intelligence provides attorneys an opportunity to get away from mindless computer tasks and back to being relentless advocates.
If A.I. Is Not Skynet, What Is It?
Broadly speaking, artificial intelligence is non-human intelligence. A machine that is able to accomplish tasks that were traditionally limited to human capabilities. In this context, it does not mean robotic consciousness.
The A.I. methods available to the legal industry today are typically a variety of math and statistics based language understanding and pattern recognition. For example, our company uses a form of A.I. known as natural language processing to understand how documents work together, allowing lawyers easily create smart templates and draft groups of documents simultaneously.
The Practical Benefits of A.I.
- Reduce errors: Computers are now capable of identifying typos, grammar errors, incorrect citations and inconsistencies in our writing. These systems can be tailored to your firm or practice area and help to provide an additional screen on our work. Think of it like spell check, grammar check and find-and-replace on steroids. Nothing is more embarrassing than a client pointing out a careless error.
- Spend less time on admin tasks: Computers can now learn from repetitive tasks. You can create workflow automation that takes certain actions based on events. A simple example is an email that automatically sends out once an invoice is paid, or an alternative clause suggested from previous contracts you have drafted when you change a choice of law provision. Streamlining workflows does not necessarily require A.I., but machine learning helps these workflows to improve over time.
- Provide more value to clients: If you are able to streamline administrative tasks and leverage computer help when filling out government forms, creating templates, scheduling meetings and finding the best supporting case law, you have more time to spend with your clients and really understand their specific situation. If you have more time to understand your client's specific circumstance, you will be able to provide better representation.
- Generate more revenue: If you are able to spend less time doing non-legal tasks, you can spend more time building your practice. You can deepen relationships with your existing clients, stay up to date on case law developments, network with referral partners and meet with potential new clients. These are all ways to leverage A.I. technology to increase work-product quality, reduce overhead, provide greater value to your clients, and increase both profit margins and billables.
We should look to A.I. not as a threat to our future, but as a powerful set tool that can help us today to become better advocates and build more profitable businesses. We are a long way from being replaced by robots. In the meantime, let's focus on using all of the tools at our disposal to provide our clients with the best representation possible.
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Tucker Cottingham is CEO at Lawyaw, an A.I. powered legal drafting platform that helps attorneys gain leverage and streamline their legal workflows.