AI In The Legal World

The legal world is a field where technology, let alone high-end artificial intelligence, has yet to strive. When people think of artificial intelligence and law, they often think of robot judges or even robotic law enforcement. While in reality, artificial intelligence offers support for lawyers, assisting them in tedious and time-consuming tasks, to allow them to be more efficient.

NR.1–Document Processing

Lawyers have to deal with a lot of documents every day. Previous cases, legal codes, non-disclosure agreements, and contracts of all sorts. After all, new laws and regulations come out every day. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is spent going through all of these, often manually.
Artificial intelligence can help lawyers search for relevant documents the same way it helps Google provide you with relevant websites for a query. And it doesn’t stop there. AI can also extract relevant pieces of information in seconds out of these documents, therefore saving countless hours of work that can now be spent on other tasks. A company like ROSS, for instance, teamed up with IBM to do just that.

NR.2–Digital legal assistants

Chatbots and other forms of digital agents are extremely popular nowadays and businesses spend a ton of money developing them. In the field of law, digital agents will most likely not replace lawyers. But they could help with tedious and time-consuming tasks, ultimately allowing firms to conduct more business.

Nowadays, with services like the Microsoft Bot Framework, law firms are able to use digital assistants that can help them schedule appointments or provide basic legal support like DoNotPay or RefugeeText for instance.

NR.3–Document anonymization

Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is enforced, there is more and more pressure on companies to properly handle sensitive data. Sometimes, the only way for a company to do this is to anonymize it. Of course, if this is done by a person, this person would have to sign non-disclosure agreements and what not. But what if no one ever had to see that confidential data?

Named-entity recognition is a technique that allows computers to identify names, locations, company names, addresses, and other types of information in the text, and therefore, contracts could be automatically anonymized for instance.