Legal Tech
Legal technology is already making inroads into disclosure of documents for litigation (eDiscovery), knowledge management, due diligence, contract analysis and review, and practice management. Our lawyers are actively involved in the development of Legal Tech working together with Gene AI and leading academics on “project Terranova”. The key objective is to develop and exploit leading-edge machine learning tools for solicitors and is being funded by Innovate UK.
On the near horizon are exciting advances in tech-assisted drafting, legal analytics, contract and document automation and online dispute resolution. The business of providing legal advice is changing too, and many predict that the sector must remould itself under powerful disruptive forces stemming from technological advances. Tomorrow’s attorneys will work very differently.
What are the key technologies? Artificial intelligence, and in particular deep learning, have opened up new vistas for legal tech. Very rapid advances in natural language processing (NLP) mean that applications can uncover and exploit semantic similarities in legal documents, making possible augmented drafting tools such as Genie AI’s SuperDrafter. CS Disco uses machine learning to predict the relevance of documents in litigation, with the potential to make review more accurate and far quicker. iManage uses AI to classify and extract documents accurately and quickly from vast data repositories. As in many recent AI success stories, supervised learning contributes much to legal tech.
But unsupervised learning, adversarial methods, and reinforcement learning approaches are all being developed at pace in one of the hottest tech sectors globally. There are hundreds of legal tech startups around the world. Withers Tech is adept at serving their legal needs. Tech startups are groundbreakers and they often need bespoke regulatory advice from us.
Legal tech is disruptive. Workplace change is inevitable and can be difficult to manage. Helping companies in the throes of tech disruption leans also on our wider capabilities in employment and corporate services.
On the bigger picture we have strategic expertise too, be that technological risk, AI ethics, reputation management and philanthropy.
Turning to developing the tech, our flagship collaboration is “project Terranova”. Innovate UK funding backs our consortium (Gene AI, Withers, and leading academics), with the goal of developing and exploiting leading-edge machine learning tools for lawyers.