Data scientists they are not, but today’s lawyers are getting less different from their tech counterparts by the day. The past few years have seen more corporate legal departments leveraging data to evaluate their outside counsel—powered, in no small part, by data management platforms and even artificial intelligence-powered analytics tools.
Of course, such technology is not exclusive to corporate law. Some financial institutions, for instance, use the same core technology to determine who qualifies for loans. Various U.S. courts also rely on it to assess offenders’ criminogenic risks, which can factor into sentencing and pretrial release decisions. To be sure, these use cases come with their fair share of controversy, including concerns over algorithmic bias.
