Will AI enable the super lawyers of tomorrow?
Our qLegal students Michele Bettini, Elaine Thuo and Damilare Odusanya attended the Legal Innovators event on the 11 October 2019. They report on a day of key insights into where legal innovation will steer the industry next.
“Innovation in the legal sector is about shaping new ideas or methods that add value”, reported Kerry Westland, Head of Innovation & Legal Technology at Addleshaw Gaddard LLP.
Despite the well-known fundamental resistance to change of the legal sector and in particular of law firms, professional roles similar to Westland’s are more and more common.
This year’s conference focused primarily on automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and lawtech. Some start-up in attendance such as Scissero, Clarilis, Manzama, Luminance, Kira, Juro and Ayfi, advertised the potential for drastic increase in law firms’ margin and profit using such technologies. They insisted there are better ways to assist in service delivery, offering a variety of services to save law firms both time and money.
Luminance for instance, is a legal tech firm that employs AI in order to understand legal language and improve document reviewing. Luminance’s team claims law firms using their software can quickly doubled or even tripled their margins, reducing their staff costs usually involved with undertaking similar tasks.
Rik Nauta is the CEO & Co-founder of Donna.legal, an “Assistive Intelligence” which provides the lawyer with convenient snippets and suggestions to enable the lawyer to focus on the big picture. It finds common mistakes and helps lawyers write and understanding complex agreements by providing intelligence and extra information.
For innovators like Rik, there will be a need to differentiate what parts of work should be performed by humans and what parts should be automated.“The aim is not to replace the lawyer with a robot, but replace the robot in the lawyer.” Rik summarised.
While AI and new technologies provide an opportunity to transform the very role of legal professionals, real challenges can arise when implementing systemic change in large organisations. Lack of management buy-in, adoption failure and lack of staff availability can for instance limit the impact of such tech driven innovations.
With the range of new services available on the market, it was suggested law firms should take their time to exhaust the solutions they already have and use before implementing any new systems available in the market. For example, Microsoft Excel has amazing tools for project management that can also be used for case management. Technology systems also don’t have to be expensive to meet their needs.
Finally, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been ‘painted’ to be a life saver. But AI lacks basic human elements such as prior knowledge, meaning and context, which are all paramount in any legal work.
“To work properly AI will always need well trained lawyers” added Johannes Stiehler, Chief Technology Officer at Ayfie.
LegalTech companies are definitely driving change in the legal industry. This is a a great time for technology-enthusiastic law professionals to forge their own career path. Shilpa Bhandarkar’s story illustrates how career shift from legal professional to tech innovation is possible. Mrs Bhandarkar was a Corporate Lawyer before becoming a tech entrepreneur when she founded COO, a smartphone application for parental time management. She now works at Linklaters LLP as Head of Innovation.
Nowadays, it is estimated that 50 % of Magic Circle law firms’ new associates do not have a legal background. Much of the future of the legal profession be diverse in background, expertise and skill set to both implement and complement the adoption of AI and automation in the profession.
qLegal is a law clinic based at Queen Mary University of London. We train the lawyers of tomorrow to provide pro bono support to start-ups and entrepreneurs. Interested in our free services? Please check out our website or get in touch- qLegal@qmul.ac.uk.