Lawyering in the AI Age

My goal is to answer these 3 questions:

1. From a law practice standpoint, why should we care about legal AI?

2. How does one build AI, generally?

3. Where to find Legal AI?

1937 Ronald Coase: transaction costs are a central determinant of how economic activity is organized.

1997 Ronald Gilson: Imperfect markets give rise to intermediaries to lift the wedge between parties. “Lawyers are transaction cost engineers.”

2015 Nicole Shanahan (at Stanford CodeX): Technology supplements lawyers as transaction cost engineers. Technology is the ultimate transaction cost economizer.

Origins: I wanted to understand what my job as a lawyer was

What the article actually says is this:

When we shift focus from thinking about legal technology in terms of a lawyer’s

efficiency, to viewing these advancements within the context of socioeconomic

organization, we can begin to realize its true significance.

Borrowing from transaction cost theory, there should be 3 core tenets of legal technology:

1. Optimizing for the exchange of information.

2. Setting consistent expectations between parties.

3. Mitigating risks.

Our job as modern legal technologists is to build software that mimics the cognitive

processes of lawyers. We expect that we can produce faster, cheaper and more accurate

legal work products.

In the context of E-Discovery/Federal Rules, for instance:

Proportionality(b) Discovery Scope and Limits.(1) Scope in General. Unless otherwise limited by court order, the scope of discovery is as follows: Parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case, considering the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties’ relative access to relevant information, the parties’ resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit. Information within this scope of discovery need not be admissible in evidence to be discoverable..

How can the tech community help with theFederal Rule of Civil Procedure 26?

One top of the head proposal….

Create a computational weighting system based on

Judge Laporte’s Proportionality Matrix

In the context of Criminal Justice

“Predictive Policing”

Prosecutor Discretion Tools

In the context of Patents

Practice Management

Valuation Analysis

Licensing Strategy

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVERTHIS IS ALL TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE

SO, WHAT DO YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT LEGAL AI?

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

DATADATA

DATA

DATA

DATA

DATA

DATADATA

DATA

DATA

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

Computa-tionalLogic (1) the representation of facts and

regulations as formal logic and

(2) the use of mechanical reasoning techniques to derive consequences of the facts and laws so represented.

Computa-tionalLaw

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

Super-vised

Learning

Unsuper-vised

Learning Training Data Hand-Labels “These e-mails

exemplify willful in-fringement”

Clustering “these e-mails have similar expres-sions of willfulness”

Dimensionality Reduction

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

Super-vised

Learning

Unsuper-vised

Learning(Deep) Neural Networks

Super-vised

LearningUnsuper-

vised Learning

30 Million Positions from previously played Go matches used as training data

It then began to play itself, creat-ing more data for “reinforcement” learning.

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

Painful and Slow

General AI

MachineLearning

Logic/Rules Automation

SUDDEN

IS IT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT THE TRANSITION TO LEGAL AI?

WWCD

What would Coase do?

“Coasean Mapping”

Forms & E-Filing

Client Intake

E-Discovery

Drafting Briefs

Client E-mails

COST

Transaction cost economizing function

COMPLEXITY

“Coasean Mapping”

Forms & E-Filing

Client Intake

E-Discovery

Drafting Briefs

Client E-mails

COST

Transaction cost economizing function

COMPLEXITY

Gen-eral

AI

Legal Singularity?

www.legaltechlist.com

WILL GENERAL AI REPLACE LAWYERS?