Canadian Lawyer

w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 21 or friends come to you about, such as overcharges on a phone bill, being rebooked on a flight or a parking ticket. It doesn't make economical sense for a lawyer to spend time on these issues, when they could be assisted cheaper by AI bots. Another legal chatbot is Destin.ai, a Cana- dian-based legal software that describes itself as an "immigration assistant" in Canada. The welcoming and easy-to-understand website employs a Facebook Messenger chatbot to determine the eligibility of the inquirer of immigration to Canada. Chatbots can be used not only to pro- vide legal information to the public but also to automate and improve marketing or daily tasks done by a lawyer. One such soft- ware is LawDroid, which assists lawyers to "[s]chedule appointments, dictate notes, create and assign tasks, all with the power of your voice." As opposed to DoNot- Pay, LawDroid is lawyer facing and can assist lawyers to create their own chatbot for their websites. An around-the-clock chatbot could assist in converting website visitors to leads and standardize law firm tasks, among other things. Create your own chatbot The future is bots, and lawyers can take advantage of them to improve their law firm service. To create your own chatbot, you will want to: Define your goals: What will your chatbot do? How will you measure success? What possible benefits in your practice would there be? How does that compare to the cost of creat- ing the chatbot? Choose a channel: Where do you want your chatbot to operate? Consider how your clients currently communicate with you and/or what platform they are more likely to use — do you have a Facebook page, do your clients use Facebook Messenger or is your website the more appropriate place to engage with your clients? If, for example, you are a personal injury lawyer, then Facebook may be a good marketing plat- form. If you have an intellectual property boutique, maybe potential clients find you through Google and you want a chatbot hosted on your website. Choose a chatbot: There are several do-it-yourself plat- forms, such as Chatfuel, the relationship-based messenger marketing, Zendesk, the customer service and engagement platform, or Hubspot, for marketing, sales and service. When choosing a chatbot, consider the platform's popularity (i.e., has it stood the test of time and will it continue to exist in the future?), the software's ease of use, whether it is easy to inte- grate with your chosen messaging platform and, of course, the pricing. Create a conversation map: You need to design a chatbot conversation, even if you work with a developer. It may be useful to do a legal process map and/or to create a decision tree that maps out the possible conversation paths. Note that though you may work with a developer, they will not be a sub- stitute for the lawyer. Training a chatbot requires effort on the part of the lawyer just as much as the developer. Leaving the work solely in the hands of a developer or taking a throw-it- over-the-fence approach will not work. You are the expert and the person who will be able to formulate the right questions to best understand your client's needs. If the questions are not skilful, several issues could occur: The chatbot conver- sation will feel unnatural to users, the client feedback may be poor because the app acts in a way to which clients may not be accustomed and the output may be factually unre- liable because the chatbot failed to identify a legal issue. Chatbots are just one example or instance of AI in the law. It does not include other examples in legal research such as ROSS or contract analysis such as Kira. The potential of chat- bots is huge and AI generally, and its uses continue to grow. Hopefully, I have inspired you to experiment and create your own law firm chatbot. Monica Goyal is a visiting professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is also a practising lawyer, an entrepreneur and tech innovator and founder of My Legal Briefcase. "Chatbots can be used not only to provide legal information to the public but also to automate and improve marketing or daily tasks done by a lawyer." ntitled-4 1 2018-10-25 5:55 PM

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