The use of artificial intelligence software to identify possible items of concern in legal documents is well established. However, the real possibilities are only now being opened up with a new generation of systems.
Breakthroughs in machine learning and natural language processing – ‘AI’ – have attracted a great deal of interest and investment in the legal sector over the past few years. Some commentators have hailed this technology as ushering in ‘the end of lawyers’, or at least greatly reducing the need for junior legal staff.
This may be premature. Even in routine legal work such as contract pre-screening, the ability of AI systems to scan rapidly through documents for points of interest does not remove the need for human professional expertise. In particular, what do we do with all the data the AI is throwing up?
Meanwhile, the idea of exploiting the real power of AI – the knowledge gathered by such systems – is still in its infancy in law.
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