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 A P R I L 2 0 1 7 27 F ernando Garcia is looking forward to the day when he can get his hands on Beagle, an automated contract analy- sis system powered by artificial intelligence that reads contracts in seconds, highlights key information visu- ally with easy-to-read graphs and charts and gets "smarter" with each reviewed con- tract. Also on his bucket list is an offering by yet another Canadian legal tech startup, Blue J Legal, that also uses AI to scan legal documents, case files and decisions to pre- dict how courts will rule in tax decisions. At a time when the majority of in-house counsel are under intense pressure to shave costs and run a lean team, such powerful tools are a godsend. "There's always that pressure to do more with less, so when a tool comes along that can provide more efficiency, more risk mitigation and can let you do your job better and focus on provid- ing value added, it is a strategic advantage," notes Garcia, general counsel, government affairs and corporate secretary with Nissan Canada Inc. "It's going to fundamentally change our job." This fundamental change has been a long time coming. Nearly two decades ago, the former justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, remarked with uncanny prescience in a speech before the Bombay High Court in Mumbai that "it would be a bold observer" who would deny the possibility of artificial intelligence to "enhance" lawyering and judicial-making. But even he could not foresee how artificial intelligence is now in many ways already everywhere. Ever since Watson, IBM's AI system, captured the public imagination and blew away the tech industry six years ago when it defeated two champions at the popular television quiz show Jeopardy, the technology has been developing at a dizzying pace and has immersed itself into business and in the daily lives of people around the world. Smartphones feature vir- tual personal assistants such as Siri and Google Now. Large U.S. retailers such as Amazon and Target use AI to anticipate the needs of consumers through the use of predictive analytics. Financial institutions use it for fraud detection. Smart home devices have the ability to learn a person's behaviour patterns by adjusting the settings of appliances or thermostats, while self- driving cars are inching their way to reality. And AI systems are detecting cancers. "It's moving so quickly, it's even a little mind- boggling for us," remarks Aaron Courville, an AI researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. The practice of law, however, has been largely shielded by technological develop- ments over the past 50 years, suffering little more than glancing blows. While the way that legal professionals process and share information has evolved with new technol- ogies — primarily with the emergence of personal computers, email and the Internet — it did not fundamentally transform it. That may be on the cusp of changing. Fuelled by Big Data, increased computing power and more effective algorithms (a routine process for solving a program or performing a task), AI has the potential to change the way that legal work is done, the way that law firms conduct business and the way that lawyers deal with cli- ents. A number of technologies under the umbrella of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning, natural language pro- cessing, experts systems (the ability to emu- late decision-making of a human expert) and others, allow computers to perform things that normally require human intel- ligence. Artificial intelligence systems, also known as augmented intelligence or cogni- tive computing, can be used to do many of the tasks lawyers routinely perform in areas such as compliance, contract analysis, case prediction, document automation and e-discovery. According to proponents, the emerging technologies will do it cheaper, faster and more efficiently, a development some law practitioners find disconcerting. "What machines give you is the option to get access to more and more data fast- er and cheaper — that's the real core of it," explains David Holme, chief execu- tive officer and founder of Exigent Group Limited, a global provider of legal process outsourcing services that leverage machine learning technology for discovery and con- tract processing. "It's like a searchlight that can look into the corners of the organiza- tion. Machine learning and better infor- mation will allow experts to make better judgments. And experts must be humble enough to realize that this is a tool that they can use rather than being threatened by it." Some law firms are paying heed. A number of Canadian legal tech startups are beginning to draw attention in a mar- ket that traditionally has shied away from embracing technology with much enthu- siasm. ROSS Intelligence, the brainchild of a group of University of Toronto students, has become the poster boy for illustrating AI's potential in the legal world. A virtual legal assistant powered by IBM Watson and its own proprietary innovations, ROSS uses natural language processing to understand questions posed by lawyers, sifts through legislation, case law and secondary sources and returns an evidence-based answer. But ROSS does even more. It constantly moni- tors the law and uses its machine learn- ing capabilities to continuously improve its results, which in turn produces results more quickly. ROSS began by learning bank- ruptcy law, but the firm layered it on top of that with intellectual property law, "which proved our hypothesis that we could scale ROSS's learning between practice areas," says Andrew Arruda, ROSS's chief execu- tive officer and one of the co-founders. "The goal is to build an entire ecosystem of legal AIs which enhance lawyers' abilities." The firm is also at the preliminary stages of applying ROSS's "underlying learnings and technology" to internal firm documents, which would represent a ARTIFICIAL ANDY POTTS What machines give you is the option to get access to more and more data faster and cheaper — that's the real core of it. DAVID HOLME, EXIGENT GROUP LIMITED

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