Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly expanding area of technology, making its way into everyday life in application fields ranging from entertainment to agriculture.
The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) has identified AI as one of the biggest technology trends for 2019, with patent applications relating to AI growing rapidly over the past five years.
A recent event “Tech in Legal: The Future of Law” hosted by Barclays Eaglelabs invited a number of start-ups to demonstrate how technology, such as AI, can be utilised in the field of Law.
Keynote speakers from DWF Ventures and Clifford Chance highlighted the opportunity of technology in law before the entrepreneurs had an opportunity to demonstrate their companies abilities.
Innovators included Luminance, who utilise ML to recognise patterns in text, learning from a lawyer’s interaction to reliably review legal documents. One example for the use of such technology would be for analysing a Non Disclosure Agreement to determine if there are any irregularities.
Legatics automates administrative legal work by auto filling documents through pattern recognition.
Avvoka provides a subscription based service which automates contract generation, assisting with document drafting, approval and analysis.
The concluding start-up, Genie AI utilises Deep Learning, a branch of ML, to analyse documents and recommend legal language and enforce best practice. In a demonstration, a question was asked of a legal document, for example “Am I covered for…”, to which the software would provide an answer based on its acquired knowledge.
These start-ups showcase a small example of what is possible using AI in law. Already implemented in countries across the globe, companies are seeing improved efficiency and client services by implementing software from this growing technology field.
Will AI software eventually be commonplace in business?
With increased investment, research & development and number of new start-ups, it certainly isn’t showing any signs of slowing. A number of companies already apply AI driven document analysis programmes (such as Kira Systems), it seems inevitable that more and more will adopt the use of AI in other areas of business.