The Legal Innovation and Tech Conference 2021 day two, and as per face to face conferences, the second day, more people know each other from popping into booths and networking – also there seems to be a switch that goes off in your head that says, “Hey, networking is also a valuable aspect of conferences, so get you A into gear!”.
Rico Burnett – Global Director of Client Innovation, Exigent
The Art of Navigating Disruption
Digital agility means being portable, anywhere on any device.
Less chat and more chatbot!
AI enhancement is pushing the knowledge from lawyers into the solutions the practice is developing and then using.
Innovation does not spark, get done and die – innovation is continuous and also systems developed need to continue evolving – you have to keep the momentum going.
Law firms and legal services need faster feedback models, servicing your clients with quick responses are key.
Switch on – switch off apps are growing, where they are only used and charged for when being used.
Blockchain has already been established in the finance industry and is heading the way of legal.
Demonstrate the ROI to the stakeholders, normally a good project at 30% implementation will already start paying for itself and is a good time to show the stakeholders that there is good return.
Customer information is pouring into law firms, this is valuable information and law firms should be making better use of this. Internal departments must start sharing client data, but also behaviours – like a client being a bad payer. Classify your clients by the value they bring to your firm. ABCD clients.
Ashlin Perumall Partner – Baker McKenzie
Beyond the Hype – The State of the Art of Legal AI Technology and the Future
What is AI?
“The study of how to make real computers act like those in the movies…” Lol
Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.
Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel made an observation in 1965 that the number of transistors on one inch of an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every year. He also made the prediction that this pattern would continue into the foreseeable future. So far, he has been right.
Kryder’s Law
In 2005 Mark Kryder then a Seagate executive predicted that the past trend in computer disk storage density would persist into the future, doubling at an exponential rate. Kryder predicted that the doubling of disk density on one inch of magnetic storage would take place once every thirteen months.
Daniel Martin Katz – Chicago-Kent College of Law
“We are now learning the rules and trying to predict what someone will do by collecting massive amounts of data.”
Inductive reasoning in AI can be applied successfully to many industries and applications, but law is a complex system.
There is a continuous battle in AI, applying rules vs mining the data – how much bias do you assign to each to tweak the system to give you the correct outcome.
Ashlin addressed 3 aspects of AI – Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Expert Systems.
Expert systems are made up of “If then” statements, to automate a flow – these cannot learn automatically.
These require large amounts of knowledge or data to be accumulated, which is expensive to gather and store.
Natural Language Processing is improving at an alarming rate, take for example Siri, Alexa and Google Assist.
It makes sense of human language so that it can automatically perform different tasks.
Machine Learning has two branches, supervised and unsupervised.
e-Discovery is a good example of supervised data, it takes a small sample of data, which a human applies rules to, gets the correct result for the small amount of data and then applies the “rules” to the rest of the data.
In a simplified explanation of unsupervised methods, he touched on two methods, clustering and association.
Unsupervised ML uses machine learning algorithms to analyse and cluster data. These algorithms discover hidden patterns without humans being involved.
Clustering is the division of uncategorised data into similar groups or clusters.
Association learning is a rule-based machine learning and data mining technique that finds important relations between variables in data.
AI is such a huge topic, and I battled to keep up with all the information Ashlin was sharing – the 45 minutes slot is way too short a time to explain AI to non-propeller heads.
Comic Book Contracts – A Panel Discussion
Peter Corner – Manager, Alternative Contracting
Camilla Andersen – Senior Project Leader, Comic Book Contracting Project
Robert de Rooy – Founder, Creative Contracts
Law must change, contracts need to be easily understood by the people who need to comply. A contract needs to be seen as a positive agreement, not one of punishment.
The human mind remembers images much faster and easier than the written word.
We have been using images to control humans for years – traffic signs for example!
Robert – It started with us creating a contract for people of different cultures, different languages and often people who cannot read.
Not all comic contracts are the same, some have text, some not, each contract is bespoke.
Camilla – Be very aware of cultures, sexism and racism in your avatars.
Robert – Comic strips have grown into sharing important information as well, so that is a new direction we did not think of when starting Comic Contracts.
Peter – It took 2 weeks for us to create a handyman contract and quote on the back – simple and easy to understand – no hidden loopholes.
People don’t realise the saving in creating a contract – the price of the contract fades into insignificance when they see the savings down the line.
Camilla – The transparency of the contracts becomes a marketing tool, as people speak about it and circulate it to their network.
Robert – Visual contracts bring all issues to the surface, where text tends to bury them.
Camilla – One of our very large clients told the law firm that if they did not get on board with the idea of the visual contract, they would change law firms!
These comic contracts have eliminated disputes, people tend to “read” the contract before signing, where with long text contracts the people sign without reading.
Examples of comic contracts can be seen at the World Commerce and Contracting website, https://contract-design.worldcc.com/comic-contracts
That is a wrap for day two.
