During each industrial revolution, as well as other technological leaps in society, questions always arise about how the industry will be affected by the change. Will jobs be lost? How much disruption will it cause? Will it improve our services?

Like many industries, the legal sector is now beginning to see the creep of technological advancement finding it ways into law firms. The main change we are seeing is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is transforming how the profession operates. The main idea of the introduction of AI is to free up human time to deal with more pressing or important issues.

What is AI?

AI is the computerisation of basic functions of the human mind that allow computers to undertake tasks that would typically require human intelligence. This is usually done through machine learning in which algorithms are used to analyse data, spot trends or patterns and gain knowledge from their interactions.
The applications of this machine learning are going to have a major effect on the way in which the legal sector operates in the future. Below we are going to look at some of the aspects of the legal sector that could be improved by this transformation.

Predicting Legal Outcomes

Various studies have taken place using AI to predict the outcomes of court cases. In 2016, an AI method developed by researchers at UCL, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania successfully predicted the outcome of 79% of the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.
Whilst there are no plans to replace judges or lawyers with this tech, it would be helpful for lawyers in that they could use the AI to search through numerous similar court cases to establish the probability of winning in court or whether it is worth going to court at all.

Improve Documentation & Legal Research

In a 2018 study by professors at Duke Law, University of Southern California, and Stanford Law School, legal Ai had a 94% accuracy rate compared to 85% for humans when reviewing legal documents. In addition, the Ai averaged 26 seconds to complete the task whereas their human counterparts took an average of 92 minutes.
The benefit of applying Ai to these areas is that not only does Ai do the job considerably faster, it will remove the monotony of a human being sifting through pages and pages of documents. AI would highlight only docs that require a human review whilst dealing with those that it recognises as necessary.

Divorce

Court managers have disclosed that four out of 10 people who fill in divorce application forms without the help of a lawyer have their request for the divorce process to begin rejected because they cannot complete the form correctly. A recent government initiative in 2018 saw the UK’s Ministry of Justice roll out digital divorces across England and Wales. This simplified service has reduced the number of rejected application by 95% and has seen 91% of its users satisfied with the service.
Whilst the online portal has simplified the process of filing for divorce, future AI applications could see AI advising divorcees on some of the finer points of divorce that the current simplified system cannot portray.

By Runo Ahmed


Senior Legal Recruitment Specialist at Ambipro