ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN LAW – THE STATE OF PLAY IN 2015

By: Michael Mills, co-founder & chief strategy officer, Neota Logic via Legal Insider (aka The Orange Rag)

The other day, a search for “artificial intelligence in law” produced 86,400 results from just the News section of Google’s vast index. From the Web as a whole, 32,800,000 results and from Videos – 261,000, beginning with Jude Law’s role as Gigolo Joe in the movie A.I. (thank you, RankBrain).

The first News story was “Law firm bosses envision Watson-type computers replacing young lawyers,” reporting on the answers to one question in the recent Altman & Weil survey of law firm leaders (page 82). As wittily argued by Ryan McClead, “the question is flawed on many levels

[and] … it’s time to cut the hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence in law.”

Yes, there’s something going on here. But we need to parse the pile a bit. What is artificial Intelligence (“AI”)? What is AI doing in law? Who is doing it? And where is it headed?

What is this thing called AI?

AI is a big forest of academic and commercial work around “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines,” in the words of the person who coined the term artificial intelligence, John McCarthy. A thorough and hype-free review of AI in business was published recently by Deloitte, Demystifying Artificial Intelligence, suggesting the term “cognitive technologies” to encourage focus on the specific, useful technologies that emerge from the broad field of AI.

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ComplianceHR, a joint venture of Littler Mendelson and Neota Logic, offers a suite of Navigator applications to assist human resources professionals in evaluating independent contractor status, overtime exemption and other employment law issues. Foley & Lardner uses expert systems technology to power its Global Risk Solutions service, an “integrated FCPA compliance solution that addresses each of the ‘hallmarks’ of an effective anti-corruption compliance program identified” by the regulatory authorities

Read the rest of the article on ComplianceHR and AI here on page 13.