I have read many articles about AI, and how great it is for law firms – but other than the super large firms, with large teams of people thrown at AI for that firm, where the actual is the AI?
In this series of AI articles, I wanted to gently and gingerly guide us to understanding the concept of AI, and then with a smidgeon of knowledge, try to understand where in small to medium sized law firms in Southern Africa, where the AI is now, and where it can be used in the near future.
Lawyers, new technology and adoption
Generally, nobody likes change – if it has worked for years before, then it is going to work in the future, by doing the same thing with more practice, we will do it faster and more efficiently than before, meaning more profit. For a decision to adopt technology and do things differently, must mean much bigger profits, or large savings and very quickly.
An early AI adoption is e-Discovery
With e-Discovery, the writing was on the wall – getting through the evidence and information so quickly was plain for everyone to see. The return on investment was fast. In the early days, a lot of time was needed to setup the system to work well, but it worked and saved a huge amount of time – not saying it was perfect but reduced the review time significantly. Unfortunately, there is no quick vanilla-based system to use with a simple right click, you need to invest in one of the well-known e-Discovery vendors.
Machine learning is often used in e-Discovery. Imagine teaching a computer to recognise patterns, like picking out important documents from a huge stack. This helps the AI predict which other documents might be relevant based on a few examples provided by lawyers, saving a lot of time. Additionally, the AI can automatically sort documents into relevant categories making the review process faster.
The Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows the system to read and make sense of what’s written in a document. NLP is particularly useful in finding important information like names, dates, and places within documents, which makes it easier for lawyers to locate what they need. It can also detect the tone of a conversation, such as whether an email sounds angry or friendly, and it makes searches smarter by understanding the meaning behind words rather than just looking for keywords.
Text analytics is another AI tool that acts like a detective, finding hidden connections and themes within text. This helps the AI group documents with similar content together, allowing lawyers to focus on specific topics. It also helps to identify the main ideas across many documents.
In e-Discovery, AI also uses clustering and categorisation to group similar things together. This is particularly helpful when the AI needs to spot documents that are nearly identical, so lawyers don’t waste time reviewing duplicates. It also helps in organising email threads so it’s easy to follow who said what and when.
e-Discovery is a great example of what AI can do for law firms, the barrier for most small to medium law firms is the cost of such a system.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of where the actual is AI in your law firm.