Steven Hawking famously said, “The rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.” Both the practice of law and the business of law will change with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and law firms will need to adapt to those changes.
AI in the Legal Industry
AI has been making inroads in the legal industry for years, with AI tools becoming more effective at handling an ever-expanding set of tasks. Litigators have been using technology to help them review large sets of documents for over a decade, and AI technologies have begun to assist with other tasks as well, including analyzing briefs and memoranda to find additional cases on relevant issues and scanning key documents to help tailor legal research. Companies have even designed tools to predict the outcomes of cases. On the transactional side, some companies have begun to use algorithms to automate the review and management of contracts and to aid in the drafting of some types of contracts.
