
Shaping the Future of Legal Practice By Leveraging AI
CIO Review APAC | Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionise the legal industry, becoming an indispensable tool for in-house lawyers. Law firms and legal companies that embrace AI will gain a competitive edge, as AI enables efficient data analysis and decision-making, making it an invaluable assistant to legal professionals. Understand the impact and potential of AI in the legal field.
FREMONT, CA: Artificial intelligence (AI) has just begun to emerge within the legal industry. In the next few years, the practice of law will be led by the adoption of artificial intelligence, specifically, by in-house lawyers. Just as email has completely changed the method in which business is conducted every day, AI is going to become largely prevalent in the legal industry, an irreplaceable assistant to nearly every single lawyer. Law firms and other companies in the legal industry who are hesitant to adopt AI into their everyday practices will not be able to remain competitive in the industry.
What is AI?
Stay ahead of the industry with exclusive feature stories on the top companies, expert insights and the latest news delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe today.
Before the discussion of the impact of AI in the legal industry, it's critical to define it. In the context of the legal field, the term 'artificial intelligence’ in itself might be a bit confusing. A more accurate name is cognitive computing. This term involves instructing computers on how to learn, reason, communicate, and make decisions. Generally, cognitive tools are trained vs programmed. The tools learn how to perform tasks carried out by people, where the emphasis lies on looking for patterns in data, testing the data, and providing results. AI behaves as a research assistant who can go through large amounts of data and provide information based on that.
The significance of this statement lies in the fact that, according to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are being generated every single day. It’s not possible for a human being to manually review and comprehend that amount of data.
The Concept’s Working
At the concept’s centre, AI involves teaching computers how to learn, reason, perceive, infer, communicate, and make decisions, just like human beings. The first layer is known more commonly as machine learning, where a machine makes decisions with minimal programming. As an alternative to manually writing rules for how a computer should perceive a data set, machine learning algorithms enable the computer to make rules by itself. Beyond machine learning, a larger aim is present, and it's called deep learning. Deep learning is the next layer, and it uses more advanced algorithms to perform more abstract tasks, such as recognising images.
Whether it's with deep learning or machine learning, computers become better at performing tasks through experience. The foundation of this learning is three core processes that define the functioning of cognitive computing, which are gathering information, analysing the data and comprehending it, and making decisions based on this understanding. This is an iterative process and the more times the task is performed, the better a lawyer can get better at the task.
Computers cannot piece together information, and that is where a human being comes in. Over a long period, human beings interact with computers to correct errors, and in the field of deep learning, the system corrects itself through a procedure called propagation. Irrespective of the ‘how’, all inputs function in combinations until the computer gets familiarised with the task with an acceptable degree of accuracy.
More in News