Information Technology has wormed its way into every conceivable sphere of human existence, and the law is no exception. The legal profession, historically tradition bound and labour intensive, is on the cusp of an unimaginable metamorphosis in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potentiality to affect the manner in whichthe legal world would function in the foreseeable future. Very much like e-mail changed the way we do business, AI would become omnipresent – an indispensable tool for lawyers. The charismatic American President John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy once observed, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”The legal sector was one of the first to adopt AI with some leading law firms using AI platforms in some form or the other since the year 2005. But the recent alarming headlines and predictions of AI replacing lawyers have no doubt created a creepy feeling of discomfort in the minds of many lawyers invariably anxious about the future of their profession: “You Should Stop Practicing Law Now and Find Another Profession” ; “Why Lawyers and Other Industries Will Become Obsolete”;“Rise of the Robolawyers”; “Here Come the Robot Lawyers” ; “Why Hire a Lawyer?” ; “Armies of Expensive Lawyers Replaced by Cheaper Software”. And so on! Despite these clamorous headlines, AI is unlikely to throwlawyers overboard. HuzefaTavawalla, who heads International Commercial Law Practice at Nishith Desai Associates, New Delhi, allays the fears that legal jobs are at stake, “That can never happen because one of the things that a machine lacks is a conscience. This is one of the biggest challenges of AI.” As with many new technologies, there is a cycle of hype at the outset that creates magnified expectations, even though the long-term implications of that technology may be profound and all embracing. As William “Bill” Henry Gates, the monumental American business magnate, philanthropist, and principal founder of Microsoft Corporation, perceptively noted in his book “The Road Ahead”, “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” Right now, AI in the legal profession is more of an unfolding opportunity and not a real threat, with pioneering adopters providing more efficient and cost-effective legal services to an expanding portfolio of existing and potential clients. The use of AI in law is thus in the nature of an evolution, rather than a revolution. But make no mistake – AI is already transforming virtually every business and activity that lawyers deal with, some more quickly and dramatically than others, and the legal profession will not be spared from this disruptive change. The incorporation of AI into a law firm’s systems and operations is a gradual, learning process, so early adopters would have a distinct advantage over firms that lag behind in adopting the technology. The lawyers and law firms that do not get on the AI bandwagon would increasingly be left behind, and eventually displaced. As a recent cover story published in the ABA Journal Magazine,the flagship publication of the American Bar Association, explained, “Artificial intelligence is changing the way lawyers think, the way they do business and the way they interact with clients. Artificial intelligence is more than legal technology. It is the next great hope that will revolutionize the legal profession.” Here, I am drawn irresistibly to the question – What is AI? The Oxford Dictionary defines AI as “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence and judgment, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”. At this time and for the steadily emerging future, current AI capabilities only permit computers to approach, achieve, or exceed certain but not all human cognitive functions. While some researchers are feverishly working on developing computers that can match or even overtake the human mind, sometimes referred to as “general intelligence” or “superintelligence”, such an attainment is virtually decades away. That is why important legal skills based on human judgement, inference, common sense, interpersonal skills and experience would remain beneficial for the lifetime of any lawyer like myself practising today. While AI has severalfeatures for its many different applications, two are presently most meaningful for legal applications. Firstly, machine learning constitutes the capability of computers to teach themselves and learn from experience. This means that AI can do more than blindly adhere to what it has been programmed to do, but can learn from experience and data to constantly improve its enormous positive capabilities. Dave Waters, one of the foremost international authorities on AI observed, “A baby learns to crawl, walk and then run.  We are in the crawling stage when it comes to applying machine learning.” But even at a “crawling stage”, Google’s cutting-edge machine learning research spearheaded Deep Mind system was able to defeat the world’s best human Go players! Secondly, natural language processing constitutes the automatic manipulation of natural language, like speech and text, by software and its application and integration to perform human-like analysis. AI is rapidly being applied to all major sectors of the economy and society, including medicine, finance, transportation, manufacturing, media, national defence, arts and entertainment, and social relationships. Many of these applications would create new legal issues for lawyers, such as the legality of lethal autonomous weapons, the liability issues of autonomous cars, financial bots that may run counter to antitrust laws, and the invulnerability of medical robots. But in addition to changing the subject matters that lawyers work on, it would also transform the way lawyers practice their profession. AI is rapidly infiltrating the practice of law. Instead of wading through piles of papers, lawyers can now deal with terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of documents. E-discovery, legal research and document review are getting more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. A recent survey of managing partners of American law firms with 50 or more lawyers found that over 36 percent of law firms and over 90 percent of large law firms are either currently using or actively exploring the use of AI systems in their legal practices. Professor Gary E. Marchant, a Regents’ Professor, Lincoln Professor of Emerging Technologies, Law & Ethics, developed the Technology Assessment Review (TAR), the first major application of AI in legal practice, using technology solutions to organize, analyse, and search very large and diverse data sets for e-discovery or record-intensive investigations. Going far beyond keyword and Boolean searches, TAR provided a fifty-fold increase in efficiency in document review than human review. Lex Machina, now owned by LexisNexis, uses legal analytics to predict trends and outcomes in intellectual property litigation, and is now expanding to other types of complex litigation. Wolters Kluwer leverages a massive database of law firm billing records to provide baselines, comparative analysis, and efficiency improvements for in-house counsel and outside law firms on staffing, billing, and timelines for multifarious legal matters. Ravel Law, also recently purchased by LexisNexis, uses legal analytics of judicial opinions to predict how specific judges may decide cases, including providing recommendations on specific precedents and language that may appeal to a given judge. The eminent Law Professor Daniel Martin Katz, who teachesPractice & Professionalism, E-Discovery, Legal Analytics, Legal Project Management, Legal Process Improvement and Civil Procedure at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology,haseffectively utilized legal analytics and machine learning to create a highly accurate predictive model for the outcome of American Supreme Court decisions. Many technology companies and law firms are partnering to create programs that can assist with specific practice areas, including transactional and due diligence, bankruptcy, litigation research and preparation, real estate, and other areas. Sometimes billed as the first robot lawyer, ROSS is an advanced online research tool using natural language processing powered by IBM Watson that provides legal research and analysis for several different law firms today, and can reportedly read and process over a million legal pages per minute. A similar system RAVN was developed in the United Kingdom and first publicly adopted by the law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner in London in 2015 to assist with due diligence in real estate deals by verifying property details against the official public records. According to the firm’s lawyer in charge of implementation: “once the program has been trained to identify and work with specific variables, it can complete two weeks work in around two seconds, making it over 12 million times quicker than an associate doing the same task manually.” Many law firms are developing legal bots to assist current or prospective clients in dealing with a whole host of legal issues based on their own circumstances and facts. Other groups are developing pro bono legal bots to assist people who may not otherwise have access to the legal system. Legal Decision Making AI is enabling judicial decision making in a number of ways. For example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the celebrated case of State vs. Loomis reported in 881 N.W.2d 749 (Wis. 2016) upheld the use of algorithms in criminal sentencing decisions. While such algorithms represent an early use of primitive AI, they open the door for the employment of more sophisticated AI systems in the sentencing process in the future. A number of online dispute resolution tools are being developed to completely circumnavigate the judicial process. For example, the Modria online dispute resolution tool, developed from the eBay dispute resolution system, has been used to settle many thousands of disputes online using an AI system. The British Government is developing an Internet-based dispute resolution system that would be used to resolve minor civil legal claims without any court involvement. Microsoft and the U.S. Legal Services Corporation have joined hands to provide machine learning legal portals to provide free legal advice on civil law matters to people who cannot afford to hire lawyers. In 2015, the giantmulti-national law firm Dentonscreated NextLaw Labs, an independent global incubator designed to disrupt the legal industry through innovation. In India, a leading full service law firm Cyril AmarchandMangaldas became the first law firm in India to adopt AI technology to help the firm to enhance its delivery model and provide diverselegal services more efficiently, swiftlyand accurately to its clients. In that context, the firm signed an agreement with a leading Canada-based machine learning software provider called “Kira Systems”.  These initial applications of AI to the legal professionmark the early beginnings of what would ultimately turn out to be a radical technology-based disruption to the practice of law. According to the celebrated American journalist and author Joanna Goodman in her well known treatise on “Robots in Law: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Legal Services”- “AIrepresents both the biggest opportunity and potentially the greatest threat to the legal profession since its formation.” The transformative impacts of AI on legal practice would continue to accelerate a forward movement. Today AI represents an opportunity for a law firm or a lawyer to be a leader in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and productivity, but soon the incorporation of AI into practice would be a matter of keeping up rather than being a leader.

One thing is certain – there would be winners and losers among lawyers who do or do not absorb AI, respectively. As one senior lawyer David Halliwell attached to the English law firm Pinsent Masons recently remarked,“Unless private practice lawyers start to engage with new technology, they are not going to be relevant even to their clients.” The AI train is leaving the station – it is high time to jump aboard. But here I am emboldened to sound a note of caution by turning to the foreboding words of the renowned American AI researcher,blogger, and exponent of human rationality Eliezer ShlomoYudkowsky,“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

ANOOP BOSE

Advocate,

Supreme Court of India

E-mail :[email protected]