Canadian Lawyer InHouse

NOVEMBER 2017 6 INHOUSE News Roundup Conduit Law returns to its roots after stint with Deloitte A fter 18 months as Deloitte Conduit Law LLP, founder Peter Carayian- nis announced Sept. 29 Conduit Law's "renewed independence." "We have decided that Conduit Law can scale more rapidly as an independent firm," said Carayiannis. "We are professionals with the highest standards of client service, but in a rapidly changing world we also need to be able to move in an agile and responsive way to deal with immediate client issues." "Conduit Law is back, better, and stron - ger than ever," said Carayiannis. "With our sights set on national expansion, we will continue to innovate in the legal industry, we will always put our clients first, and strive to eliminate the billable hour." In March of last year Conduit announced it was forming a new legal entity with De - loitte. At the time Deloitte said it was in- vesting in new models through affiliated law firms to "address the evolving legal re- quirements of clients." A spokesperson for Deloitte issued a statement indicating that "Effective Sep- tember 29, 2017, Deloitte LLP and Deloitte Conduit Law LLP have agreed to end their affiliation and Deloitte Conduit Law LLP will conclude its operations. Peter Carayi - annis will continue his practice through Conduit Law Professional Corporation ("Conduit Law") effective October 1, 2017. We want to thank Peter and his team for his contributions and wish him future success with Conduit Law." No one from Deloitte was available for further comment. Founded in 2012, Conduit Law offers outsourced lawyers to support in-house legal teams, provides on-demand solutions for law firms, and assists clients with short- term projects and special engagements. IH Chatbots: freeing up lawyer time and improving access to justice C an technology save time and im- prove access to justice? Just ask the in-house team at Microsoft where the software giant's lawyers are deploying chatbots to answer common questions around sales and immigration issues and free up in- house lawyers to do more high-value work. During a panel discussion Sept. 21 at the Thomson Reuters Emerging Legal Tech - nology Forum panel called Prometheus Unbound: On "Chatbots" Robot Lawyers and Ongoing Access to Justice, lawyers from a variety of backgrounds discussed the opportunities and applications for, and the growing popularity of, legal technol - ogy to address pressing needs in the provi- sion of legal services. Chatbots are computer programs that conduct a conversation with auditory or textual methods. Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence at Clio, said he thinks there are "tons" of applications for chatbots when it comes to provision of legal services, such as the ability to act in "triage" situations and the ability to reach large numbers of people. Recent examples such as the DoNotPay chatbot first launched to help people fight parking tickets, and now in use in the wake of the Equifax breach affecting about 143 mil - lion Americans, they have in a short period of time rolled out small claims initiatives for 50 states where, through a couple of simple questions, a small claims filing can be created targeting Equifax and the potential damages of their breach. "Chatbots have the ability to react very quickly and have a broad reach. I think that is both a positive and a negative for those tools," said Lenon. There is a debate around whether chat - bots are the best way to pursue an action such as the Equifax issue, but Lenon said it's a dead issue because it's happening anyway. "As access to justice becomes more of a technology concern, we should be focus - ing on what is the right technology for this question, not whether we should be using technology," he said. For large corporate or public sector legal departments, chatbots could serve to help busy in-house lawyers transition common questions from sales and other business clients to a simple platform to produce an - swers quickly. "At Microsoft, we're a very big corpor- ate in-house department — there are more than 1,400 legal professionals scattered throughout the world. Half are lawyers and we're all very, very busy. So, whenever there is any opportunity for us to de-lawyer our work or get our business clients to do more, if you will, we welcome those opportun - ities," said Dennis Garcia, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft has been working to create a number of chatbot platforms to interact directly with business clients. The com - pany has a tool called Q&A Maker that transforms FAQs into a chatbot. "We had a training earlier this year with our legal professionals on how to use that tool and create chatbots for various applications work - ing with our business clients," Garcia said. One example is that as lawyers in the field Garcia and others work closely with sales staff reviewing requests for proposal documents that contain legal questions about Microsoft contracts. "We have found that as lawyers we're an - swering the same questions time and time again. So we're in the midst of creating a bot our business clients can go to get a lot of the common questions answered from the legal perspective," he said. "It's sort of a one-stop shop for business clients to go to get their questions answered." Microsoft has also been working with its immigration legal practice group to create a

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