On 4th March 2020, I attended a talk at the London School of Economics. This interactive discussion was taken by Damian Fleming, the Head of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s Manchester Office. His key focus is process efficiency and enhancing service delivery for key clients.
This discussion was titled ‘Demystifying Legal AI’, which follows on nicely from my last write-up. A theme throughout the talks I have been recently attending is that technology is here to assist lawyers, not replace them.
“To support, not replace the advice….”
Why use A.I?
A.I can save time, shorten the journey to success, and improve the margin. As I wrote in my previous write-up, there will always be at least 20% of every transaction needing to be done by a human.
Of course, A.I will not suffer from the same defects that humans are susceptible to in a work context such as fatigue, distraction, and of course, you won’t get a robot being distracted before lunchtime! All of this means that the drudgery of certain tasks can be avoided if handed over to technology. An idea that will be welcomed at all levels of a business, especially from the bottom up, warming the hearts of paralegals everywhere.
We will still need a quality lawyer to identify certain terms in agreements, for example.
A further definition of A.I was offered:
“Any system which can support or assist with a process which involves a series of integrated tasks”…
Interestingly, it was said that there will be jobs in ten years’ time being advertised that do not have a name now.
The conversation was then brought back to what clients want and what technology can provide. It is likely that clients won’t trust technology to make human interaction points throughout a matter. Humans will always be able to negotiate in a more effective way than A.I, for the foreseeable future, in any event.
It was also said that the current capabilities must be kept in perspective. Yes, there are very exciting advances but equally, there are still areas that cannot be filled.
