AI, the new angle for lawyers

Purvi Pokhariyal 

“Digitisation is the future. Artificial intelligence and data-backed computing will take over all the jobs.”

Statements such as these have started gaining  traction amongst technological evangelists and future thought leaders in the past couple of years. With vocations across banking and information & technology seeing a paradigm shift in their core operations, one can see why these statements hold weight.  

Two fundamental professions that fall under this grouping are professors/teachers and lawyers. Both of these vocations operate under strong human interactions that have been forged over long periods of time. While AI and digitisation are disrupting these two fields immensely, one cannot ignore the various facets that trust and human interaction bring to the forefront. 

Changing paradigms

Though technological advancements can help in processing and churning colossal amounts of data, fundamentals such as an eye for detail, perceptive clarity, pragmatic and rational thinking, and assertive analysis shed light on the importance of one’s knowledge and expertise. 

Artificial intelligence and digitisation will largely change the way the professional legal framework functions. These disruptions can improve the productivity of a traditional lawyer in investigating through large chunks of data that appear every day in the form of archives. 

While carrying out due diligence, a specific sort of record can be indicated as pertinent, pushing AI applications to discover different archives that are also applicable. 

Machines are a lot quicker at dealing with reports than people, and can create profits and results that can be factually approved. 

They can also help diminish the workload on human workforce by sending out only those archives that are faulty instead of expecting people to audit every single report in search of mistakes. 

It’s critical that legitimate research is done in an efficient and thorough way, despite being tedious, and computational intelligence can aid law firms immensely in this process. 

In law firms around the globe, experts are kept occupied with leading due diligence strategies that reveal base data in the interest of their customers. This work incorporates affirming statistical data points and altogether assessing the choices on earlier cases to adequately give guidance to their customers. 

Computational intelligence has the ability to break down information to enable it to make predictions. These results at the offset can define the probability of results based on years of data. 

With AI coming into place, an archive can be evaluated in merely seconds. It can perceive critical language and evaluate issues, finding and distinguishing similitudes depending on the past authoritative language from which the machine has been prepared. The machine can also recognise language, including the diverse areas that require examination, in the form of risk, reimbursement, tax assessment, and protection issues. 

All in all, it is time for prospective lawyers to embrace this disruption since law as a vocation revolves majorly around complex human interaction, which can never be automated by Artificial Intelligence. 

— The writer is Director and Dean, Institute of Law - Nirma University