Managing Legal
So says Alex Hamilton, describing the gist of his recent speech to a conference about innovation in law practice — specifically about the role of artificial intelligence in companies’ creation and management of contracts.
A former partner at Latham & Watkins’ (2nd highest earning law firm worldwide in 2019 according to The American Lawyer) London office, and co-Chair of its global Technology Transactions Group, Hamilton founded Radiant Law in 2011, a law firm that supports large companies and banks in their major outsourcing and technology contracts, day-to-day commercial contracts, and contract review projects.
Radiant does contract automation in a big way — working with applications like docassemble (a free, open-source systems for guided interviews and document assembly originally created by a lawyer / computer programmer), and Contract Express (Thompson Reuters’ document automation software). Radiant’s mission is to free up businesses from manual drafting and review of masses of agreements by overwhelmed lawyers — replacing that traditional approach with faster, more accurate, and much cheaper contract creation and management.
So Hamilton’s description of the “circus of AI” does not reflect any skepticism about this technology’s potential for improving legal services.
Instead, lawyer and tech pioneer Alex Hamilton argues that his legal profession — my legal profession — is unserious about any meaningful use of AI for the foreseeable future (“AI and Contracting”, December 3, 2019).