Canadian Lawyer InHouse

27 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE MARCH/APRIL 2019 considering procuring. But many other legal departments are placing the onus on law fi rms to offer great- er value for the legal services they provide. "As these AI tools become accepted in the marketplace, a natural corollary is that in- house counsel will also be expecting their outside counsel to use such tools," says Kosa, president of the Canadian Technol- ogy Law Association and the chairman of the Canadian Bar Association's Intellectual Property Section. "For two reasons. They would expect legal costs with respect to certain types of legal activities to drop, and they would also expect the quality to be maintained or improved." Or, as Isi Caul- der, co-leader of the AI practice group at Bereskin & Parr LLP, puts it: "Our clients are forcing us to be awake." Many law fi rms are rising to the challenge. Caulder, for one, has a panoply of AI tools at her dispos- al, many of which are centred around patent analysis and outcome predictions to obtain insights over a patent examiner's patterns and practices, which makes for a cheaper and smoother process for clients. Munroe's OWT department, meanwhile, principally offers AI-enabled due diligence and e-dis- covery tools, as does McCarthy Tétrault in addition to contract management AI tools. Partnering with a law fi rm to use AI so- lutions can reap rewards as Siemens discov- ered. The multinational engineering and electronics fi rm is often involved in merg- ers and acquisitions as well as reorganiza- tions, and Brait was wondering whether the use of new legal technologies could increase the effi ciency and accuracy of its process. Its law fi rm piloted four technologies, includ- ing two separate contract analysis tools that used AI and machine learning to identify contract terms as part of the due diligence. The trial compared a manual review with the AI-assisted one. While both achieved similar levels of accuracy, with both miss- ing between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of clauses for which they were looking, the AI contract analysis tool took about half the time. This spurred Siemens to con- clude that the use of such tools would be a requirement for its fi rms on future trans- actions. What's more, the fi rm is now ex- amining how it uses these tools internally. "I just don't want to address our needs as a department," says Brait. "What we created was intended to address the needs of our business. We need to create tools that allow us to make customers happy." In the meantime, Demone expects to im- plement multiple technology-based tools, some of which will be AI-powered. But she's at the beginning of the process. She has begun identifying processes that she would like to automate and is beginning to explore her options. "In-house lawyers know the business really well, so the idea is to free up the lawyer's time to do the things that the tools can't do to add value in differ- ent ways," says Demone. IH Master the law. Canada's leading law school offers a graduate degree in four unique streams: Business Law Canadian Law in a Global Context Innovation, Law and Technology Law of Leadership Apply today. Visit gpllm.law.utoronto.ca Questions? gpllm@utoronto.ca Untitled-6 1 2018-05-25 11:45 AM

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