Blog: All About Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing as Emerging Legal Technologies

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The Legal industry, unlike other businesses, has historically approached change in moderation, reflecting lawyers’ responsibility to respect historical norms and instances. However, lawyers, and firms alike, must also innovate, because with changing times, existing norms and practices get outdated. With the help of technology, legal firms can embrace change easily.

The scope of legal technology adoption can be determined based on how well the questions below can be answered.

How can legal tech gel with the existing ecosystem and law practice?
How can legal tech make your daily job easier?
How can legal tech help you provide more thoughtful advice to clients?
How can legal tech ultimately make you better, more intuitive, and a more proactive lawyer?

Role of Artificial Intelligence as Emerging Legal Tech

Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered apps can answer the above questions reasonably well and can help lawyers save time.

Given the nature of work in legal industry, many gigs of data are collected and stored in the form of documents, images and videos. In the existing scenario, if understanding and preparing documents takes anywhere between 1 to 4 weeks, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, it can become a matter of hours.

AI can help review documents, filter out relevant information from the noise and present a case summary. It has huge potential to help you make faster decisions, identify similar cases, compare history and do image analysis (labelling objects in images and videos).

Machine Learning

The dawn of Machine Learning – a type of Artificial Intelligence – in legal tech has already set where computers have the ability to learn on their own each time they come across a new problem whose solution hasn’t been pre-programmed. The more such software is used, the smarter it gets.

Such apps can study and understand the case, and thereby suggest relevant laws, risks, facts that may otherwise not be considered on their own, and provide a range of available solutions. With Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence alerts can be sent to attorneys advising them to take caution or show the probability of their success, based on the success rate of other similar cases and jury’s verdict.

Knowledge management is another area where AI can be applied in law firms. It can grow from just being an online repository of documents and an internal portal with news on it to being a platform where lawyers share expertise, product and new ideas. Machine Learning based apps can suggest which fellow attorneys with whom one should connect to augment one’s ideation process.

NLP & Chatbots

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and a chat interface, the ChatBot can ask questions to users pertaining to their legal issues and generate a form or letter they can submit to the relevant authorities.

NLP can help clients, who are unfamiliar with legal terminology, detect the common synonyms for the input phrases and match them with the right answers.

For instance, if a client writes that they want to “keep their kids” as a part of divorce, a bot will offer up the answer for “custody.”

Challenges

One of the main impediments in adopting a new legal tech is the lack of willingness to trust. Lawyers must always make sure that the data security, privacy and compliance are never compromised.

Hence, they must also understand these technologies enough so that they can be embedded in everyday life. That’s when the actual transformation takes place and the benefits of the new technology can be realized.

Solution

Clients want a better legal product faster and cheaper, and AI coupled with chatbots can address this need. Artificial Intelligence can automate a lot of work and save time for more value-added work. Law firms need such class of software to meet the demand for efficiency and the pressure of an increased bottom line.

So, why not talk to experts who have years of experience in legal domain?

Motifworks works with many law firms of varying size to help increase efficiency utilizing advanced tools such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, NPL and Chatbots. Advances in technology can seem overwhelming but with Motifworks expertise, experience and proven process, you can focus on achieving results. Not quite ready for advanced technology? Motifworks can help you move securely to the cloud, provide Data Analytics, and help you make smarter business decisions. Want to learn more? Just reach out for a quick call.