The promise of the AI to assist humans in legal tasks brings with itself possibilities of increased access to legal information and higher efficiency in doing legal work.
Some of the areas where AI has started to improve human efficiency are:
- Document automation – Legal work traditionally requires a lot of paperwork and hence a significant portion of professionals in legal space involves composing and processing documents. AI can ingest several such documents and learn to generate similar documents for humans. The AI can also learn to extract useful information from these documents and execute pre-defined logic.
- Legal Research – Identifying the cases applicable in current matter can profoundly impact the outcome of the case. The AI can improve the case law search and enable it to recommend more relevant cases. The ability of computers to understand the judgements can also provide insights into the likely outcome of the case and in some cases help represent cases in a manner that is better for analysis.
- Technology assisted review – Due diligence of existing legal documents and extracting critical information from a large volume of documents in highly complex matters is where AI can hugely reduce the human burden. AI assisted review would enable legal professionals to be do more accurate due diligence and enabling them to process higher volumes of legal documents.
- Legal Advice – Traditionally lawyers have been the primary source for seeking legal advice. With the rise of the internet blogs and internet forums have given people another avenue to get legal advice. With the recent advancements in NLP and AI in the form of conversational AI the possibility to have machines understand a legal query and provide accurate legal advice has become a reality. Added with machine translation the legal advice can also be provided in multiple languages has become a possibility.