Artificial Intelligence Making Law More Accurate and Cheaper

July 2, 2021

Automate Repetitive, Error-Prone Deal Tasks, or Continue to Pay Junior Lawyers Hundreds-Per-Hour to Do Them Manually?

The Point

Factor is a prominent “alternative legal services provider”, or “law company”. That means it offers technology and workflow process professionals to support delivery of legal services; but, unlike a law firm, it has no attorneys who offer legal advice directly to clients. In June Factor announced a “Legal Transaction Optimization” service to automate routine transaction tasks for law firms that do complex corporate deal work:

“By unbundling transactional tasks from legal advice, law firm juniors billing at high rates are replaced with tech-enabled teams specialized in producing better output.”

This Matters

1. Factor’s service costs a lot less than what law firms have been charging for these transactional tasks (50% less in a recent reported deal).

2. Factor’s technology-enabled, automated process is likely to be more accurate than junior lawyers’ manual efforts at due diligence, document assembly, and other repetitive, error-prone tasks (for instance, see here). Continue reading

June 14, 2021

AI-Powered Tech Now Available to Cut the Cost, Increase the Accuracy, of a Big, Recurring Corporate Legal Task

by Joel A. Webber

The Point

Artificial intelligence-powered contract review systems allow automated analysis of thousands of contracts at a time, rendering unnecessary their manual review by attorneys.

Use of this technology yields major cost savings in attorneys’ fees, while producing more accurate results.

This Matters

Prior to purchasing a corporation or real estate, the purchaser and its bankers conduct “due diligence” of contracts to which the acquired corporation is a party, or of agreements connected with the real estate. They’re looking for terms that might pose risk, or terms that might be a source of value.

Traditionally, this has meant hiring lawyers to read each contract in search of those terms. Many lawyers. Many hours of reading. Many hours to pay for. Continue reading

March 14, 2020

Empower Business People to Speed Up their Contract Negotiations via Technology — Avoid the Lawyer Logjam

by Joel A. Webber

Speed-to-contract is vital to your revenues.

As a P&L executive you know that.

As a former P&L executive — now practicing law — I know that.

But too many lawyers just don’t. They focus on verbal tweaks and “improvements” that hold up the process.

…

It was only after I accepted a corporate client’s invitation to leave law practice and run one of its divisions that I understood how important timely execution is to doing the deal. Until then I was preoccupied, like most of my lawyer colleagues, with constant adjustment of terms in pursuit of a legally perfect document.

Of course the answer can’t be that we eliminate attorneys’ contribution to all this. Speed-to-contract that ends up with the wrong contract terms is self-defeating.

But now there’s technology that helps to accelerate the pace, while incorporating good legal guidance into a much more agile and timely process.

March 6, 2020

Artificial Intelligence Takes Another Step To Reduce Lawyers’ Hours Your Business Has to Pay For — If and When It’s Adopted

by Joel A. Webber

P&L executives concerned with managing legal risk and controlling legal costs should know that artificial intelligence (AI) promises greater accuracy and lower costs in litigation tasks. If and when the legal industry adopts the technology.

And last month some of this promise appears to have been realized in some concrete, and economically accessible, terms. Again, conditional on actually acceptance and use of this AI.

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For a business, litigation is (usually) a huge waste of money. And a large chunk of this wasted money goes to formal requests that lawyers make to judges. Requests that they and their adversaries spend lots of time (read “money”) fighting over in front of a judge.

It’s called “motion practice”: Your honor, please dismiss this case; please exclude this testimony; please make my adversary give me the papers in their files that I want to look at; etc.

In a legal industry where the number of hours billed (usually) defines value, this typically results in each law firm assigning not just a litigation veteran whom they put in charge of the case — but also multiple, less-experienced attorneys to maximize those hours billed.

How do these less-experienced attorneys fit in here? Happily (for the legal industry’s business model at least), “motion practice” requires lots of what those recent law grads were trained to do when still in law school: Researching cases, statutes, and rules; and creating “briefs” that describe why those legal authorities require that their client’s requests (via this “motion practice”) should be granted.

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Late last month, Casetext, a legal tech firm known for its artificial intelligence (AI) research tool “Case Analysis Research Assistant” (CARA), announced “Compose”, their automated brief-writing product.