At the 2018 Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Institute, I ran into a number of people who came to the conference to investigate artificial intelligence.
Some were questioning whether AI was ready for prime time, while others were looking for case studies from the Institute’s presenters and vendors. Although this year’s sessions on AI were less sexy than asking Alexa to find the answer, the examples at CLOC were quite remarkable in demonstrating what could be accomplished today by embedding artificial intelligence into workflow applications.
AI is not only very real, but it can make a dramatic impact in a law department...
At lunch on the first full day of the conference, I struck up a conversation with the Director of Operations for a large multi-national conglomerate. He was interested in the business impact of the current AI tools on the market. Based on the full house at Julian Tsisin’s session, “Artificial Intelligence in 2018: It’s High Time to Become Educated Consumers,” this gentleman was not alone.
Husch Blackwell uses Kira System’s machine learning platform for contract review among a collection of other tools. So over lunch, I shared a recent experience where a client asked one of our M&A teams to review close to 1,000 contracts in less than 24 hours. Not only was one associate using Kira able to deliver the data on assignment restrictions, but the firm saved the client more than $10,000 and some amount of frustration by not having to wait for an answer.
...the question isn’t whether machine learning tools are perfect, just whether they are better...
As Mark Chandler, General Counsel and Senior Vice President at Cisco Systems, explained from the stage on the last day of the Institute, AI is not only very real, but it can make a dramatic impact in a law department by enabling greater self-service, lowering the cost of contract review and accelerating turnaround times.
One reason for this is that the technology’s error rates have dropped considerably. Today, Chandler noted the question isn’t whether machine learning tools are perfect, just whether they are better than “this guy” (Cue the image of a person searching for a needle in a haystack).
The Talent Question
I too came to CLOC with a few questions about AI, one of which I posed to Tsisin, the former manager of legal technology at Google, after his session on Sunday. What is the best way for current legal operations professionals to gain an understanding of Machine Learning in order to apply the technology?
To my surprise, Tsisin recommended two online courses from courses that I was already familiar with. The first is actually a series of courses called the Data Science Specialization, offered by Roger Peng, an Associate Professor of Biostatistics, and others at John Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Andrew Ng, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, teaches the second course on Machine Learningand appeared several times in Tsisin’s presentation materials.
To complete these courses, one must be willing to roll up one’s sleeves, as the courses require a bit of programming to illustrate these concepts. This is really the fundamental challenge of learning this technology for those well into their legal operations careers. The courses which are readily available require a working understanding of linear algebra and some calculus and the willingness to learn a new programming language. For those with the curiosity and determination to explore this domain, the more one’s company can get ahead of the learning curve.
For those who are still in law school, there are a couple of newer options on the market. During the last day at CLOC, I happened to be sitting behind Bill Henderson and Daniel Linna, two professors who are spearheading the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (I-FLP). We spoke about their focus on a more experiential form of education, including boot camps and externships, where students learn about the business climate, practice legal project management skills and gain some experience with cutting edge technology.
Following the CLOC Institute, I also reached out to Charlotte Alexander, who directs the Legal Analytics Lab at Georgia State University, to find out about their program’s offering. Alexander said that GSU’s Institute for Insight is moving “full steam ahead” incorporating analytics sprints on real-world data problems with teams of law and analytics graduate students.
For those interested in a career in legal operations, there are some new pathways appearing alongside more traditional law school curriculum.
Design Platforms
The other question I brought to CLOC was whether platforms like Neota Logic or KIM were versatile enough to incorporate artificial intelligence into a wide range of applications and deliverables.
Several years ago Husch Blackwell launched the Clery Compliance Toolset on Neota’s platform and learned just how powerful cloud-based workflow tools with embedded legal guidance could be for our clients who were seeking cost-effective service models. These types of systems are also good candidates for law departments interested in building NDA systems, like Cisco’s, or other more routine transaction processes and who may not have as much access to in-house technology resources.
On Tuesday afternoon at CLOC, I caught up with Orlando Conetta, the Director of Research and Development at Pinsent Masons, who also works with AI and has similar experiences building applications in the cloud. Conetta reminded me that while some of the law departments and vendors at CLOC had some stunning models to demonstrate, these examples were still quite simple compared to the complexity of many legal workflows.
"We are barely scratching the surface."
Conetta also spoke to the future potential for these solutions, “We shouldn’t assume that we are addressing all of a client’s needs today. We are barely scratching the surface.”
Once these workflow systems solve the problem of handling NDAs cost effectively, law departments and their service providers will go on to address the many latent needs within their organizations and the larger legal ecosystem. Mary O’Carroll echoed these comments as she closed the CLOC Institute this year, “As much as we’ve made huge strides, there are still so many areas of our industry where technology is not meeting our needs…We need more development and adoption in new technologies in areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence which hold almost endless promise for us.”
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[Lann Wasson is Associate Director of Legal Project Management at law firm Husch Blackwell.]
