AI in Practice: a glimpse at the road ahead

Posted on January 31, 2020 by PinHawk Editors

This week PinHawk launches its coverage of AI in Legal Practice.  We’re publishing the first in what will be a continuing series of special reports that will focus on the companies, products and people that are responsible for building the legal market of tomorrow.

Depending on which expert you speak with, artificial intelligence and machine learning are either just the latest overblown hype to sweep through the legal market or else they are transformative technologies that will truly revolutionize the nature of legal practice and how legal work gets done.  With such divergent views among the pundits and commentators, it’s hard for the rest of us to form a clear picture of exactly what changes AI/ML technology is likely to bring in the coming years.  That’s the goal of these PinHawk special reports. We will be taking a closer look at some of the current realities of AI in Legal Practice and try to advance your understanding between these two competing views. 

• Our coverage starts with a great overview by Brad Blickstein who has just undertaken the first comprehensive survey of AI-assisted tools in the legal market.  In the first part of two-part article, Brad outlines how both the business and practice of law will be impacted by next generation of AI-assisted tools for data analytics and outcome prediction.
• No matter how powerful these new emerging technologies may be, there are nonetheless significant obstacles that are slowing down the rate of adoption of AI/ML in the legal market.  In the next part of our coverage, we consider one of the more surprising and significant roadblocks, which results from the labor-intensive process of system training.
• Looking beyond these short-term obstacles, Ron Friedmann provides us with a high-level vision of how AI tools and technology, working in conjunction with other long-term trends and pressures influencing the market, may ultimately prove to have a profound impact that effectively rewires the entire legal industry.
• Finally, as a central part of our coverage, we want to provide readers with an introduction to some of the people and products that are driving market transformation.  For this issue we had a chance to interview Lane Lillquist, the CTO and co-founder of InCloudCounsel, one of the companies that is deploying AI-assisted tools to create a new platform for corporate law departments to manage high-volume contracting.  It’s hard not to be caught up in the energy and enthusiasm of Lane’s vision.  As Lane explains in his interview:  “I’m continually amazed at the power of technological innovation…”

What’s happening in the legal market today is part of a much larger story which touches almost every sector of the world’s economy and culture.  The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning is part of what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution; it rests upon the convergence and integration of digital, biological and physical systems, which opens the door to incredibly more powerful and streamlined ways to manage information, as well as to produce all conceivable types of goods and services. In other words, it’s a pretty big deal, and well worth paying attention to the way these emerging technologies are spurring the economic, social and cultural transformations of the 21^st century.  We hope you find PinHawk’s ongoing coverage a helpful guide to the road ahead.