So the law firm partner of the future will be the leader of a team, “and more than one of the players will be a machine,” said Michael Mills, a lawyer
and chief strategy officer of a legal technology start-up called Neota Logic.
Two obvious factors have led to that downsizing: tightened legal spending and digital technologies
that automated some tasks, like document searches, said Mr. Yoon, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Ask for the case most similar to the one you have and the Ross program, which taps some of IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence technology, reads through thousands of cases
and delivers a ranked list of the most relevant ones, Mr. Salazar said.
Artificial intelligence has stirred great interest,
but law firms today are using it mainly in “search-and-find type tasks” in electronic discovery, due diligence and contract review, Mr. Allgrove said.
But recent research and even the people working on the software meant to automate legal work say the adoption of A. I.
in law firms will be a slow, task-by-task process.
For years, labor economists said routine work like a factory job could be reduced to a set of rules that could be computerized.
Instead, it took two and a half years to refine the software so it could readily identify concepts such as noncompete contract clauses
and change-of-control, said Mr. Hudek, chief technology officer of Kira Systems.
Technology will unbundle aspects of legal work over the next decade or two rather than the next year or two, legal experts say.
“For the time being, experience like mine is something people are willing to pay for,” Mr. Yoon said.
