Is Artificial Intelligence a Legal Assistant?
LegalTech is a fast-growing field. But besides chatbots and various database integrations it has a lot more to offer. Today we’d like to talk about potential benefits of artificial intelligence for legal companies.
Artificial intelligence in law has been developing for several years already. For instance, back in 2016 an algorithm predicting Strasbourg Court decisions with 79% accuracy was created in the USA. The project started as an experiment, but even then lawyers supposed that it would be in demand for prioritizing the cases. Another team created an algorithm that predicts the U.S. Supreme Court decisions with 70% accuracy.
Jurisprudence is characterized by information and verified data abundance. A lot of cases were resolved during the hearings or were analyzed, and we can say for sure where some mistakes occurred and where everything went well, which case was a success and which one was a failure.
The main key to success in using AI for legal documents processing is the ability to “understand” human language. However, this is ensured by NLP (Natural Language Processing) mechanisms which have been developed for the main world languages for years. As for the legal texts, they are even easier for AI to process as they tend to have similar structure and similar semantics, they also don’t contain idioms or any other peculiarities typical for creative language. Therefore, AI demonstrates such great results in more than one direction of legal services automation.
Case law analysis
Lawyers spend a huge amount of time on case law analysis. Sometimes it takes weeks to find the required case. Artificial intelligence is able to check a whole database of legal cases and assess how much they relate to the client’s situation. The more the system is used the more precise it is going to become due to the algorithms’ instant learning.
Bankruptcy management
Bankruptcy is a complex procedure which varies from country to country. It is characterized by a considerable amount of manual work as well as by exceptional meticulousness. It is required to check all the assets of the debtor, an individual or a company, analyze their recent activity and file a lot of documents. Therefore, using a robot in this field seems like an optimal solution. By the way, legal firm Baker and Hostetler uses Watson computer based artificial intelligence developed by IBM. And it’s in charge of the bankruptcy related tasks!
Work planning
How much time will the case require? What resources are going to be involved? Sometimes the answer is not so evident as you need to take many factors into consideration — from some cases peculiarities to courts workload. But Casebook service developers have already been using an algorithm that helps predict possible outcome and expected duration of the case.
Here at Smartcoders we support a strong customer interaction strategy. Neural network integration into legal company’s processes can be really beneficial, and prediction of a case duration is one of the most evident results that can be achieved through constant neural network development and algorithms learning.
Detective work
One more example of such integration is data collection. A “digital detective” most often uses social networks which are a true information goldmine. Thus, car accident witnesses can be found by means of analyzing pictures and messages posted, social networks also reveal the contacts of your client or your opponent. Moreover, pages in social networks provide you with a lot of useful information as well as help file in the profiles of potential participants of the case — and all that in a matter of several seconds!
Litigations monitoring
By the way, artificial intelligence can update a certain legal firm about the progress of litigations in different regions and countries. Those can be company’s own cases or any lawsuits of interest in the same field. You can monitor legal claims against individuals and legal entities. Automated analysis and recognition of the documents published on courts’ websites enables you to react momentarily to the ongoing events, as well as build up a strategy and appeal to the right institutions.
Filing a lawsuit
When it comes to filing a lawsuit AI also comes in handy for optimizing the processes. Usually lawyers spend a lot of time drafting and checking the lawsuit. However this routine process can be for sure optimized. That’s exactly what was done in Russian “Sberbank” (currently “Sber”), which, according to the management expectations, was supposed to help cut 3000 jobs within one year. The bank simply decided to transfer lawsuit filing against individual debtors to AI. At the same time the management sent some of the lawyers that used to be in charge of that for retraining and further education so that they could take up more challenging tasks.
Conclusion
Of course, transformation needs time. But even today every company can benefit from the existing accomplishments in LegatTech field in order to optimize its processes. Applications drafting, documents sorting, case law systematization — neural networks are capable of taking care of all that. At Smartcoders, we are interested in further development of Legal-expertise and we’re ready to take part in any legal activity automation project not only as a solution provider but also as a reliable partner.
