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AI has come to make the lawyer great by doing the tedious and complex tasks, especially related to long contracts

No other technology has conjured fear like AI (Artificial Intelligence). Imagine the future with AI - and you either see the positive (like R2D2-like droid companions) or the negative (think killing Terminator machines). The media terrifies us with stories of the intelligent AI agents taking over.  But you know what’s the scariest nightmare of all … AI-powered Lawyers … for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

What is AI? It started in academia in the 1950’s and continued mostly in esoteric academic journals until the 1990’s, when breakthroughs in simple tasks like handwriting recognition occurred. In early 2010’s, an academic team led by the University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton first demonstrated how marrying modern computing power with huge data sets and deep complex neural models could deliver breakthrough accuracy results, ultimately giving rise to the modern AI era.

Fast forward to today .. we see simple but limited “autonomous” cars … we see intelligent devices like Alexa, Siri, etc.  We see many novel approaches of applying AI to different problems. When will we see fully self-driving cars on the road? 2020? 2030? 2050? 2080? What about competent AI-powered Lawyers … the stuff of nightmares and perhaps, some dreams.  2050?… we simply don’t know.

Let’s not mistake modern technological sophistication for an ability to predict the future. Your iPad may have more computing power than most computers 5 years ago and can instantly get you your social feeds and stream video. It can even power many autonomous tasks with AI capabilities. But its ability to predict the future is just like anyone else’s .. non-existent.

Source: Freepik

Here’s the truth… AI is just like most technologies. It’s bits and bytes sitting in hardware, moving quickly. It all depends on how you use it. AI can navigate weapons. It can help understand language. It can listen to your commands. It can cause your insurance rates to go up. And yes, it can also help lawyers.

AI helping lawyers? But how? Firstly, by not pretending to be a lawyer. Because the lawyers don’t want that. Nothing is worse than bad predictions made by automated “Robo-lawyers”. AI should not tell lawyers how to practice law and lawyers should not tell AI engineers how to build algorithms. And no, the AI is not going to intelligently negotiate your contracts for you. At least, not until May, 2064 ;)

It turns out there’s many ways AI can help lawyers. AI is great at tedious tasks, because it never gets tired and it never bills you based on their time. And it’s also great at helping attorneys manage complexity… especially related to long contracts, allowing attorneys to dive deep into contracts to unearth the language buried in long legal paragraphs. To make the complex much more simple.

At My Legal Einstein, we don’t believe that the AI is great - we believe that the AI can make the lawyer great. By empowering the lawyer with superhuman powers, by augmenting the lawyer’s intelligence and by providing insights uncovered by untiring algorithms.  We believe that the AI should learn from the lawyer, not the other way around.