Artificial intelligence and machine learning are already helping attorneys see how different decisions—including what outside counsel to use, or whether to use them at all—will affect litigation settlement amounts, legal fees, and case duration. Going forward, those technologies will only become more advanced, giving AI-assisted lawyers such an unfair advantage over their competitors that not using AI may start to border on malpractice.

But there’s a catch: You don’t get this unfair advantage unless your data is clean and complete for the purposes at hand.