17 ms·

Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

97 points by dsil 9y ago

tzfld 9y ago
So, is that mean lawyers can be replaced by robots in the future?
- steveeq1 9y ago
  Hopefully so.
- onion2k 9y ago
  Some of them, yes. If your job is taking data and transforming it in to different data, or taking data and interpreting it to produce new data, then a computer is going to be better at it than you very soon. If the developers of that software can persuade your boss (and any relevant government authorities) that this is the case then you'll need a new job soon. This is true in all professional services. If your job includes any creative work than isn't simply derived from previous work then you're safe for a while. But probably not forever...
  - fncypants 9y ago
    Very true. There is a fundamental role that lawyers play that is an intangible: to pursue justice for the client. Much of why law is expensive and has been slow to automate is because of intentional and unintentional barriers. Unintentional because it has developed in evolutionary form, over hundereds of years, and during that time has imperfectly used human language as its protocol. Contracts and statutes are difficult to make perfect using the English language. Lawyers thus argue over what the parties intended and understood when they fixed their promises into words. Intentional because of, for example regulatory capture. Law is an industry that has taken actions in the past to make itself necessary. But even if these barriers are fixed and much of law is automated, there remains a notion of what is fair and right, or ought to be fair and right. This is a human concept. Take for example blockchain and its contracts, which remove some of these barriers. Currency is transferred to/from one address to another because that is what the code intended, and the code is law and the transaction immutable. But what if the other side fraudulently misrepresented who they were? Do you not want a human advocate and arbitrator there to determine what is right in this situation?
- mywittyname 9y ago
  It's already happening, it's just not visible because the lawyers being replaced are the young, entry-level people that get stuck doing research early in their career. I think many people are expecting this to democratize the legal system. My fear is that it will consolidate power into the hands of a few top firms and raise the barrier to entry dramatically.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
I have to be honest, I'm a bit suspicious considering the study was conducted by the company which developed the AI and that the academic auditors are all law professors and not AI professors.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  As long as they did a reasonable job of making sure the company running the AI didn't have the questions long enough to just go cheat, I think the law professors should have much more to say about the output than an AI professor would.
- DanHulton 9y ago
  I'm not surprised at all. I just joined a company that has a similar product, and everyone we demo it for is amazed at how accurate and quick it is. AI and law is a huge untapped market that's just starting to get explored. Consider - law language is very frequently very similar, to the point where that's where the phrase "boilerplate" was adopted from for coding. Is it that surprising that AI would be very, very applicable to this kind of problem?
crabl 9y ago
"The AI also completed the task in 26 minutes, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average", should be 26 _seconds_, according to the infographic on the source page: https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/ https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  That makes WAY more sense. If the model is pre-trained it would be really tough to hit 26 minutes. Maybe put a few "sleep" calls in there?
  - tabtab 9y ago
    The older I get, the more "sleep" calls my brain makes ;-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwaway2016a 9y ago
This part of the article goes with my general: > So does this spell the end of humanity? Not at all. On the contrary, the use of AI can actually help lawyers expedite their work, and free them up to focus on tasks that still require a human brain. Although what that does not point out is it will still cost jobs just not "all" the jobs. It will soon take less people to do the same job and unless the demand grows or the demand currently vastly outpaces supply, companies will need to downsize. There is a best case. It could be that no one loses their job and it means Doctors, Lawyers, and Engineers can start working 40 hour weeks and have a work live balance.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  The best case is that lawyers feel the pinch, because that’s maybe the only way we’re ever going to see real legislation to protect people in this area. As long as automation is seen to largely hurt people on the bottom of the totem pole, there will be hand-waving galore. The moment it starts to bite people who see themselves as indispensable and important, especially the people who are most of the lobbyists and politicians, that will end.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > The best case is that lawyers feel the pinch, because that’s maybe the only way we’re ever going to see real legislation to protect people in this area. Probably not; while lots of legislators (and lobbyists) were trained as lawyers, protecting the jobs of people who actually practice law isn't really something that shows any evidence of being a priority in that class; in fact, a large majority of them spend much of their time railing against practicing lawyers as a class. Unless the political and electoral calculus forces them to adopt protections (to which the threat to practicing lawyers is pretty much irrelevant), don't expect any action.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Given how well trial lawyers and lobbyists do, I wouldn’t read too much into what politicians say, when it doesn’t lead to commensurate action.
mrleiter 9y ago
> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to be a better lawyer; since I am not already on top of the food chain, we (as graduates) will be eaten away. Also: it is important to keep in mind that this is strictly contract law. Criminal and maybe to some extent tort law will be in the hands of real people for some foreseeable time, at least in regards to representation. Representation must not be strictly seen in a legal manner. As a lawyer you are also a fellow human with emotions, who must weigh pros and cons specifically adapted to your client. And that, right now, is a human thing only. Research and drafting documents - that I believe will also be dominated by AI. Simply because economies of scale and cost/effectiveness ratio.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nopinsight 9y ago
  The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specialize in other laws and thus increase supply and lower costs for less automatable areas over time? I know little about the legal market. So I'm curious if the above analysis makes sense for it.
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    I'm thinking this effects paralegal services more than legal services. - email/scan docs get a highlighted doc back to review with clients, possibly with citations to the legal justification etc.
  - 9y ago
microtherion 9y ago
So will high powered AI lawyers band together to form "white USB cable" law firms?
js8 9y ago
I wish such a technology could be in hands of ordinary people, so that one wouldn't need an expensive lawyer to spot a contract that is being unfair to him.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  This will likely make lawyers much cheaper to hire since it will only require maybe an hour of their time, of which 95% will be spent talking to you and the other 5% spent running an AI app on the contract.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc There's your MVP right there. Seriously, over time I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the most egregious things put in contracts are around open-ended liabilities and indemnifications. It seems like it would be straight-forward to create a tool that simply scanned for which party has liabilities, and what limits there are on those liabilities. It is not everything, but it would be a good first pass.
  - dghf 9y ago
    > cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc I hate to be that guy, but you have a Useless Use of Cat[0] there. [0] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - dbcurtis 9y ago
      Sure. grep could take the file. I knew that when I wrote the above line. We could have a nice debate about readability and maintainability, compositional design over compact expression, etc. But that's kind of over-kill for a joke, eh?
- mfoy_ 9y ago
  I'm imagining a tool that you run against a ToS or a EULA or whatever and it spits out bullet point plain-English results. It would make actually reading the damn things plausible.
dragonwriter 9y ago
The AI was clearly faster, which is no surprise. But since the "correct" answers for the test were assigned by one group of humans, and the correct answers in real practice are also determined by (a different group of, compared to either those running the test or those taking the test) humans, I'm not sure that result that the AI was more correct can be in any sense meaningful.
- tantalor 9y ago
  That's exactly how every human-vs-AI evaluation is measured. For example, if you have an AI detect whether an image contains a cat, your first step is to have a person manually check every image. Of course it is possible for the test/evaluation labels to be incorrect. Nothing about this case is special, at least nothing you have pointed out.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > That's exactly how every human-vs-AI evaluation is measured. No, it's not. For instance, there are comparison on games with fixed definite rules. And even if it was, the fact that a methodological weakness is universal in a field doesn't make it not a weakness, it just makes the field problematic as a whole. > For example, if you have an AI detect whether an image contains a cat, your first step is to have a person manually check every image. Sure, but the thing is if you are comparing humans to AI at finding cars in pictures, you are usually testing against lay humans with no special expertise, so the assumption on which usefulness of the experiment rests is “an academic expert evaluating pictures for the presence of cats approximates perfect accuracy near enough that it is unlikely that the score of either lay humans or AI against that expert significantly misstates their accuracy.” With the legal case, the assumption is something like: “an academic expert evaluating the legal effect that a court would find in a set of contracts approximates perfect accuracy near enough that it is unlikely that the score of either experienced lawyers practicing in the the field or AI against that panel significantly misstates their accuracy.” The former is, of course, not certain, but I think most people would accept it to be more likely than not to be true. The latter is less believable (unless, for example, the expert used as the oracle is actually the Supreme Court of the jurisdiction whose law is to be applied in evaluating the contracts.)
jgaa 9y ago
What is the 'utm_campaign' in the url? Is someone selling hacker news exposure?
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters
- jwilk 9y ago
  Here's the URL without tracking junk: https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts/ https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts...
wizardforhire 9y ago
One day we can all look back and say, I remember the day the first protocol droid was born.
PeterMikhailov 9y ago
Now we need top AI public defenders to help give legal counsel to indigent defendants in states that refuse to properly fund their defense.
- adamiscool8 9y ago
  Is anyone working on solutions in this space?
  - PeterMikhailov 9y ago
    Cynically, I really doubt it. Where would the money payoff for this be?
personjerry 9y ago
AIs are terrible at open-ended questions, and interpretation of law is usually open-ended. In this experiment they had pretty well-defined structure and evaluation criteria, which sets the AI up to be successful, whereas in real life there is rarely such definition.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
> This technology will never fully replace a human lawyer, but it can certainly speed up their work by highlighting the most important sections of a story. That's optimistic thinking but AI can and probably will replace lawyers and doctor's at some point. At least a large majority. All legal consulting could easily be replaced, courtroom lawyering will probably be the last to go because a lot of that is emotional to sway jurors one way or another.. Unless the jurors are replaced by ai as well...
mv4 9y ago
I've always felt that a well-written contract should "compile" without errors and warnings. Instead, in dealing with even simple business contracts, I routinely see things that contradict each other, or are open to interpretation. There needs to be a good validation process for contracts.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
A "new study" AKA a marketing gimmick dutifully reported as if it were the truth from God's lips by press release dumping ground websites. One important point: are the bots liable for malpractice, or no? That's one of the things that you pay for when you pay for a lawyer: you pay them to put their necks on the line, also.
jasonmaydie 9y ago
I find it weird that whenever AI comes up, it's not to help but to replace.
lykahb 9y ago
With the increasing use of AI in law, there will be an incentive to make the texts more tractable for AI. Perhaps this may lead to the changes in the law language, eliminating the remaining ambiguities.
MBCook 9y ago
Could this lead to a ‘spreadsheet moment’ for lawyers? Something that does the rote work that lawyers used to have to do by hand?
matthewmcg 9y ago
We are evaluating similar software for use during due diligence review in investment and M&A transactions at my firm. We have found that the software is good for identifying when contracts have certain troublesome clauses such as restrictions on assignments in an asset sale. These tools certainly save time and make document review faster and more accurate. The biggest issue we have found is that this type of review does not identify when contracts are missing key terms. For that, we still need someone with experience in the relevant field thinking about the business context of the agreement and the potential risks.
IncRnd 9y ago
What about false positives? False negatives? What about when different legal language is used? How does punctuation affect this? What about differing laws per jurisdiction? The article is great for an instant hit of wonder about how great AIs are, but an attorney still needs to review the output of the AI.
EGreg 9y ago
"This technology will never fully replace a human lawyer..." Why not?
- rhaps0dy 9y ago
  Because it benefits the company to say so in PR statements. Also it's going to be hard to _completely_ replace human lawyers; you'll need general intelligence.
klokoman 9y ago
I'm gonna go full populist here and say that instead of making AI really smart so that they can read a contract, we should make AI as smart as an average human and discard the contracts it can't understand.
- crusso 9y ago
  I'd be happy if as a first pass the AIs went through and cleaned up our mess of legal frameworks so they made logical sense to a being of any intelligence.
gamblor956 9y ago
TLDR: AI replaces lowest-cost portion of legal practice, AKA "document review." For those of you familiar with the legal field, document review involves reading and summarizing documents. This task is left to new graduates because they don't have the skills or experience to actually do anything useful. Looking at LawGeex website, it appears that all the AI does is heuristically match common terms, phrases, and cases to guess what legal issues are raised in the document reviewed. It certainly makes the process of document review more efficient, but it's not revolutionary.
gumby 9y ago
Discovery has been automated for a many years (and FWIW this was how HP got interested in Autonomy -- which turned into a scam). This is moving up the stack a bit with some "AI" clickbait added.
neuralzen 9y ago
This is one of the reasons I think Agrello will be a successful project, as it aims to have an AI engine process legal contracts into smart contracts. Granted it currently still currently requires a lawyer of a particular region to create an interpretive template.
terminalcommand 9y ago
The AI could really help in due dilligence which is usually left for the youngest associates/trainees. By the nature of the work, you have to review and summarize thousands of documents. And as this process takes a long time, you cannot charge the standard rates to the client. Instead you work overtime without charging anything thus receiving no extra compensation. I remember doing a due dilligence work during one of my summer internships, where my only job was to scan documents for any non-spanish documents. If the document was in spanish and contained no suspicious names, I closed it. If not, I printed it out. I had to do this for hours and hours in the night. I think AI would be a great fit for such tasks.

97 points by dsil 9y ago

tzfld 9y ago

So, is that mean lawyers can be replaced by robots in the future?

steveeq1 9y ago
Hopefully so.
onion2k 9y ago
Some of them, yes. If your job is taking data and transforming it in to different data, or taking data and interpreting it to produce new data, then a computer is going to be better at it than you very soon. If the developers of that software can persuade your boss (and any relevant government authorities) that this is the case then you'll need a new job soon. This is true in all professional services. If your job includes any creative work than isn't simply derived from previous work then you're safe for a while. But probably not forever...
- fncypants 9y ago
  Very true. There is a fundamental role that lawyers play that is an intangible: to pursue justice for the client. Much of why law is expensive and has been slow to automate is because of intentional and unintentional barriers. Unintentional because it has developed in evolutionary form, over hundereds of years, and during that time has imperfectly used human language as its protocol. Contracts and statutes are difficult to make perfect using the English language. Lawyers thus argue over what the parties intended and understood when they fixed their promises into words. Intentional because of, for example regulatory capture. Law is an industry that has taken actions in the past to make itself necessary. But even if these barriers are fixed and much of law is automated, there remains a notion of what is fair and right, or ought to be fair and right. This is a human concept. Take for example blockchain and its contracts, which remove some of these barriers. Currency is transferred to/from one address to another because that is what the code intended, and the code is law and the transaction immutable. But what if the other side fraudulently misrepresented who they were? Do you not want a human advocate and arbitrator there to determine what is right in this situation?
mywittyname 9y ago
It's already happening, it's just not visible because the lawyers being replaced are the young, entry-level people that get stuck doing research early in their career. I think many people are expecting this to democratize the legal system. My fear is that it will consolidate power into the hands of a few top firms and raise the barrier to entry dramatically.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

I have to be honest, I'm a bit suspicious considering the study was conducted by the company which developed the AI and that the academic auditors are all law professors and not AI professors.

maxerickson 9y ago
As long as they did a reasonable job of making sure the company running the AI didn't have the questions long enough to just go cheat, I think the law professors should have much more to say about the output than an AI professor would.
DanHulton 9y ago
I'm not surprised at all. I just joined a company that has a similar product, and everyone we demo it for is amazed at how accurate and quick it is. AI and law is a huge untapped market that's just starting to get explored. Consider - law language is very frequently very similar, to the point where that's where the phrase "boilerplate" was adopted from for coding. Is it that surprising that AI would be very, very applicable to this kind of problem?

crabl 9y ago

"The AI also completed the task in 26 minutes, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average", should be 26 _seconds_, according to the infographic on the source page: https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/ https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/

throwaway2016a 9y ago
That makes WAY more sense. If the model is pre-trained it would be really tough to hit 26 minutes. Maybe put a few "sleep" calls in there?
- tabtab 9y ago
  The older I get, the more "sleep" calls my brain makes ;-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwaway2016a 9y ago

This part of the article goes with my general: > So does this spell the end of humanity? Not at all. On the contrary, the use of AI can actually help lawyers expedite their work, and free them up to focus on tasks that still require a human brain. Although what that does not point out is it will still cost jobs just not "all" the jobs. It will soon take less people to do the same job and unless the demand grows or the demand currently vastly outpaces supply, companies will need to downsize. There is a best case. It could be that no one loses their job and it means Doctors, Lawyers, and Engineers can start working 40 hour weeks and have a work live balance.

IntronExon 9y ago
The best case is that lawyers feel the pinch, because that’s maybe the only way we’re ever going to see real legislation to protect people in this area. As long as automation is seen to largely hurt people on the bottom of the totem pole, there will be hand-waving galore. The moment it starts to bite people who see themselves as indispensable and important, especially the people who are most of the lobbyists and politicians, that will end.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The best case is that lawyers feel the pinch, because that’s maybe the only way we’re ever going to see real legislation to protect people in this area. Probably not; while lots of legislators (and lobbyists) were trained as lawyers, protecting the jobs of people who actually practice law isn't really something that shows any evidence of being a priority in that class; in fact, a large majority of them spend much of their time railing against practicing lawyers as a class. Unless the political and electoral calculus forces them to adopt protections (to which the threat to practicing lawyers is pretty much irrelevant), don't expect any action.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Given how well trial lawyers and lobbyists do, I wouldn’t read too much into what politicians say, when it doesn’t lead to commensurate action.

mrleiter 9y ago

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to be a better lawyer; since I am not already on top of the food chain, we (as graduates) will be eaten away. Also: it is important to keep in mind that this is strictly contract law. Criminal and maybe to some extent tort law will be in the hands of real people for some foreseeable time, at least in regards to representation. Representation must not be strictly seen in a legal manner. As a lawyer you are also a fellow human with emotions, who must weigh pros and cons specifically adapted to your client. And that, right now, is a human thing only. Research and drafting documents - that I believe will also be dominated by AI. Simply because economies of scale and cost/effectiveness ratio.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nopinsight 9y ago
The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specialize in other laws and thus increase supply and lower costs for less automatable areas over time? I know little about the legal market. So I'm curious if the above analysis makes sense for it.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  I'm thinking this effects paralegal services more than legal services. - email/scan docs get a highlighted doc back to review with clients, possibly with citations to the legal justification etc.
- 9y ago

microtherion 9y ago

So will high powered AI lawyers band together to form "white USB cable" law firms?

js8 9y ago

I wish such a technology could be in hands of ordinary people, so that one wouldn't need an expensive lawyer to spot a contract that is being unfair to him.

merpnderp 9y ago
This will likely make lawyers much cheaper to hire since it will only require maybe an hour of their time, of which 95% will be spent talking to you and the other 5% spent running an AI app on the contract.
dbcurtis 9y ago
cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc There's your MVP right there. Seriously, over time I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the most egregious things put in contracts are around open-ended liabilities and indemnifications. It seems like it would be straight-forward to create a tool that simply scanned for which party has liabilities, and what limits there are on those liabilities. It is not everything, but it would be a good first pass.
- dghf 9y ago
  > cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc I hate to be that guy, but you have a Useless Use of Cat[0] there. [0] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    Sure. grep could take the file. I knew that when I wrote the above line. We could have a nice debate about readability and maintainability, compositional design over compact expression, etc. But that's kind of over-kill for a joke, eh?
mfoy_ 9y ago
I'm imagining a tool that you run against a ToS or a EULA or whatever and it spits out bullet point plain-English results. It would make actually reading the damn things plausible.

dragonwriter 9y ago

The AI was clearly faster, which is no surprise. But since the "correct" answers for the test were assigned by one group of humans, and the correct answers in real practice are also determined by (a different group of, compared to either those running the test or those taking the test) humans, I'm not sure that result that the AI was more correct can be in any sense meaningful.

tantalor 9y ago
That's exactly how every human-vs-AI evaluation is measured. For example, if you have an AI detect whether an image contains a cat, your first step is to have a person manually check every image. Of course it is possible for the test/evaluation labels to be incorrect. Nothing about this case is special, at least nothing you have pointed out.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > That's exactly how every human-vs-AI evaluation is measured. No, it's not. For instance, there are comparison on games with fixed definite rules. And even if it was, the fact that a methodological weakness is universal in a field doesn't make it not a weakness, it just makes the field problematic as a whole. > For example, if you have an AI detect whether an image contains a cat, your first step is to have a person manually check every image. Sure, but the thing is if you are comparing humans to AI at finding cars in pictures, you are usually testing against lay humans with no special expertise, so the assumption on which usefulness of the experiment rests is “an academic expert evaluating pictures for the presence of cats approximates perfect accuracy near enough that it is unlikely that the score of either lay humans or AI against that expert significantly misstates their accuracy.” With the legal case, the assumption is something like: “an academic expert evaluating the legal effect that a court would find in a set of contracts approximates perfect accuracy near enough that it is unlikely that the score of either experienced lawyers practicing in the the field or AI against that panel significantly misstates their accuracy.” The former is, of course, not certain, but I think most people would accept it to be more likely than not to be true. The latter is less believable (unless, for example, the expert used as the oracle is actually the Supreme Court of the jurisdiction whose law is to be applied in evaluating the contracts.)

jgaa 9y ago

What is the 'utm_campaign' in the url? Is someone selling hacker news exposure?

andyjohnson0 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters
jwilk 9y ago
Here's the URL without tracking junk: https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts/ https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts...

wizardforhire 9y ago

One day we can all look back and say, I remember the day the first protocol droid was born.

PeterMikhailov 9y ago

Now we need top AI public defenders to help give legal counsel to indigent defendants in states that refuse to properly fund their defense.

adamiscool8 9y ago
Is anyone working on solutions in this space?
- PeterMikhailov 9y ago
  Cynically, I really doubt it. Where would the money payoff for this be?

personjerry 9y ago

AIs are terrible at open-ended questions, and interpretation of law is usually open-ended. In this experiment they had pretty well-defined structure and evaluation criteria, which sets the AI up to be successful, whereas in real life there is rarely such definition.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

> This technology will never fully replace a human lawyer, but it can certainly speed up their work by highlighting the most important sections of a story. That's optimistic thinking but AI can and probably will replace lawyers and doctor's at some point. At least a large majority. All legal consulting could easily be replaced, courtroom lawyering will probably be the last to go because a lot of that is emotional to sway jurors one way or another.. Unless the jurors are replaced by ai as well...

mv4 9y ago

I've always felt that a well-written contract should "compile" without errors and warnings. Instead, in dealing with even simple business contracts, I routinely see things that contradict each other, or are open to interpretation. There needs to be a good validation process for contracts.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

A "new study" AKA a marketing gimmick dutifully reported as if it were the truth from God's lips by press release dumping ground websites. One important point: are the bots liable for malpractice, or no? That's one of the things that you pay for when you pay for a lawyer: you pay them to put their necks on the line, also.

jasonmaydie 9y ago

I find it weird that whenever AI comes up, it's not to help but to replace.

lykahb 9y ago

With the increasing use of AI in law, there will be an incentive to make the texts more tractable for AI. Perhaps this may lead to the changes in the law language, eliminating the remaining ambiguities.

MBCook 9y ago

Could this lead to a ‘spreadsheet moment’ for lawyers? Something that does the rote work that lawyers used to have to do by hand?

matthewmcg 9y ago

We are evaluating similar software for use during due diligence review in investment and M&A transactions at my firm. We have found that the software is good for identifying when contracts have certain troublesome clauses such as restrictions on assignments in an asset sale. These tools certainly save time and make document review faster and more accurate. The biggest issue we have found is that this type of review does not identify when contracts are missing key terms. For that, we still need someone with experience in the relevant field thinking about the business context of the agreement and the potential risks.

IncRnd 9y ago

What about false positives? False negatives? What about when different legal language is used? How does punctuation affect this? What about differing laws per jurisdiction? The article is great for an instant hit of wonder about how great AIs are, but an attorney still needs to review the output of the AI.

EGreg 9y ago

"This technology will never fully replace a human lawyer..." Why not?

rhaps0dy 9y ago
Because it benefits the company to say so in PR statements. Also it's going to be hard to _completely_ replace human lawyers; you'll need general intelligence.

klokoman 9y ago

I'm gonna go full populist here and say that instead of making AI really smart so that they can read a contract, we should make AI as smart as an average human and discard the contracts it can't understand.

crusso 9y ago
I'd be happy if as a first pass the AIs went through and cleaned up our mess of legal frameworks so they made logical sense to a being of any intelligence.

gamblor956 9y ago

TLDR: AI replaces lowest-cost portion of legal practice, AKA "document review." For those of you familiar with the legal field, document review involves reading and summarizing documents. This task is left to new graduates because they don't have the skills or experience to actually do anything useful. Looking at LawGeex website, it appears that all the AI does is heuristically match common terms, phrases, and cases to guess what legal issues are raised in the document reviewed. It certainly makes the process of document review more efficient, but it's not revolutionary.

gumby 9y ago

Discovery has been automated for a many years (and FWIW this was how HP got interested in Autonomy -- which turned into a scam). This is moving up the stack a bit with some "AI" clickbait added.

neuralzen 9y ago

This is one of the reasons I think Agrello will be a successful project, as it aims to have an AI engine process legal contracts into smart contracts. Granted it currently still currently requires a lawyer of a particular region to create an interpretive template.

terminalcommand 9y ago

The AI could really help in due dilligence which is usually left for the youngest associates/trainees. By the nature of the work, you have to review and summarize thousands of documents. And as this process takes a long time, you cannot charge the standard rates to the client. Instead you work overtime without charging anything thus receiving no extra compensation. I remember doing a due dilligence work during one of my summer internships, where my only job was to scan documents for any non-spanish documents. If the document was in spanish and contained no suspicious names, I closed it. If not, I printed it out. I had to do this for hours and hours in the night. I think AI would be a great fit for such tasks.