IBM’s Watson may play a part in helping firms better manage pricing. Early this year, IBM sunk $1 billion into creating a new business unit, the IBM Watson Group, to develop and commercialize Watson in several specific industries, including legal. Rich Holada, vice president of transformations for the legal industry in the IBM Watson Group, said the unit is targeting three sets of customers: large law firms, legal service providers, and corporate law departments.
Holada stresses that Watson is not a product, but a cognitive platform. He sees three possible uses of the technology in the legal industry—all would require that Watson be “trained in the legal corpus,” essentially by reading an unstructured document set of legal knowledge.
