Find out how AI-First Strategy has impacted legal services from legal research to contract reviews.
Legal Services and Artificial Intelligence are making waves in legal research, litigation protection, contract review and contract analysis. These are essential processes in which artificial intelligence can be a great help. Notoriously, manual processes have finally come to the point of modernization with the advent of AI.
Legal Services and AI are currently in the process of being continually integrated into business processes that bring about disruption in the form of automation and in the elimination of human error. What were once tasks that would take professional lawyers at least 90 minutes to complete now takes AI just a few seconds. When it comes to Legal Services and Artificial Intelligence, power and speed disrupt how things are traditionally done.
AI First has many different use cases across different industries. For instance, AI First enables projects that improve an existing process. In the realm of legal services, AI is able to perform tasks that a normal lawyer would, such as reviewing contracts, conducting legal research, etc.
In legal services, AI provides legal research. Legal research refers to looking at historical data in order to infer information about present cases. This improves the chances of lawyers covering all the bases that they could possibly cover--in order to present the strongest case possible.
Legal research involves junior firm associates toiling through physical caselaw volumes to find fact patterns that match up to the present case. With AI, this daunting task can be automated--thus saving time, energy, and resources.
Currently, there are models being trained to predict the outcomes of legal cases. As these models learn to predict case outcomes, better, companies will be able to minimize the amount of cases that actually need to go to trial. Not only that, but it makes settlement negotiations easier and faster because of the additional foresight provided by these models.
Our entire society is governed by legal contracts. For instance, when you sign a Terms and Conditions contract, you are legally bound by the clauses included within it. In the legal industry, reviewing contracts is another highly essential process that AI can now automate. AI now has the capability to completely take over the process of reviewing contracts with a high potential to outperform human lawyers.
Contract Analytics comes in after the contract has been reviewed and signed. What happens is that NLP-powered models would automatically stay on top of a company’s existing contracts--thereby providing accurate and timely information as to when a certain contract will expire, what legal obligations have been imposed and/or breached, and what contracts are best renegotiated.
AI is making waves in the law, particularly in reviewing contracts.
There is a striking similarity between AI and Law. AI and Law both look at historical data to infer ways to solve a new problem. Hence, it is no wonder why there is much interest in this regard. In legal services, AI is used to review contracts, analyze contracts, predict litigation, and conduct legal research.
A certain start-up focuses its attention on reviewing contracts. Contract review is a highly essential service because virtually everything we do is governed by some legal contract. It might not be apparent, but our lives are guided by these legal contracts.
This company uses AI to review contracts based on a firm’s predefined policies. They claim to review contracts just like a human lawyer would. On top of that, they also claim to be able to handle live negotiations.
In a study where the company pitted its own algorithms against human lawyers, the algorithms outperformed the lawyers with a whopping 94% test accuracy. More than that, the model can do it faster than a human lawyer can.
In this particular case, NLP (Natural Language Processing), is the field in which contract review resides. This is because most of the data is textual. Additionally, the challenge is to extract contextual information and act accordingly, as is being done by the company.
Hence, in a legal firm that would like to switch to AI First, it would be worth collaborating with startups that specialize in building models that digest particular textual data and work on them via predefined user policies. The biggest advantage in going AI First for a legal company is the amount of time and manpower they could save.
In a study, it took 92 minutes for human lawyers and 26 seconds for the model to review previously unseen contracts. That is, the model performed 21,230% faster than humans. From a business perspective, the firm could potentially cater to much more clients and charge them more for the lightning-fast service.
For clients, this solves the problem of waiting for a contract review job to conclude. For the firm, this helps add business value to their service, which will enable them to charge more as well as optimize their clients’ experiences--thereby earning their loyalty and continued patronage.
Another company has developed software that is able to perform contract analytics. Using Natural Language Processing, their models are able to perform instant error checking, comparisons between other contracts, and fairness and risk analysis.
How it works is that the model uses Natural Language Processing to build a Legal Language Model (i.e. a model that can parse and contextualize legal language), and identify areas for improvement in a contract such as if a clause were worded ambiguously and is due for renegotiation.
The policies that the model follows take best practices, risk factors, and jurisdictional differences into account. Hence, it is a highly complex model that is able to execute an equally complex task.
Other factors that it takes into account when performing contract analytics are language complexity, legal phrasing, and enforceability. Its suggestions will be grounded on these factors--thus the model by nature aims to improve the readability, consistency, and compliance to standards and best practices of a contract.
Apart from improving an existing contract, their model also performs risk management. The model is meant to identify risky and/or ambiguous language in a document and tag it as a risk so as to guide users in terms of what needs to be renegotiated. It identifies inconsistent terminology, ambiguous language, and language errors as clear signs of risk. It
In terms of Machine Learning Techniques used, the model employs supervised deep learning to extract various parameters from contracts. Additionally, it also employs reinforcement learning. Meaning, it ingests thousands of contracts to learn and improve its internal policies on its own. In terms of risk management, the model converts complex legal language into numeric expressions before applying the statistical methods to it.
Here at codvo.ai, our business and technology experts are passionate about promoting the integration of Legal Services and Artificial Intelligence. We believe that when these two are combined, there is a greater potential to make a lasting impact on society as most of our society is governed by the law. Legal Services and Artificial Intelligence brings about a completely objective, powerful, and fast approach to completing legal tasks such as contract review, contract analytics, legal research, and litigation protection.
If you are interested in reorganizing your company to harness the power of AI-driven processes, contact us today at marketing@codvo.ai !
