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Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

mashable.com

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Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#61

Post by crusso »

mrleiter wrote: post #9

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to…

What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably

Yeah, as this kind of software progresses, fewer people will be required to do one of the main jobs that lawyers do well - reading through tons of legal documents.

Additionally, even mediocre attorneys and paralegals will be able to provide a good level of service by leveraging the software.

What will happen is that the industry will need to focus on higher-level tasks to find productive work.

Sorry to sound cynical, but unfortunately for the rest of us, idle lawyers usually do a great job of creating new work for other lawyers out of thin air.

Like I've always said: when a medical doctor runs out of patients, he can't just go around breaking peoples' legs to make more work. Lawyers, however, can cause a great deal of destruction when they want something to do. That destruction creates work for yet more lawyers. The ultimate display of that ability is when they go into politics. :)

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#62

Post by wpasc »

entee wrote: post #54
polskibus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you end up writing text in a way that fools auto summarizing AI. War against AI starts in law.

This. So much this. One big problem with AI/ML as is currently eating the world is that it's just a really fancy averaging engine. It memorizes (incredibly, beautifully, superhumanly) but it doesn't really actually understand. There's a whole spate of "lets trick the AI" in image processing, I have to believe that there are easy ways to do the same with text. That said, one counterargument could be that obfuscating a…

I read a great, great paper about training systems against this. Obfuscation is currently easy against AI, but obfuscation that fools an AI and a human could still detect (Purposeful perturbations). This can be pre-trained against by incorporating such perturbations programmatically during training.

Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.06640.pdf

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#64

Post by gamblor956 »

TLDR: AI replaces lowest-cost portion of legal practice, AKA "document review."

For those of you familiar with the legal field, document review involves reading and summarizing documents. This task is left to new graduates because they don't have the skills or experience to actually do anything useful.

Looking at LawGeex website, it appears that all the AI does is heuristically match common terms, phrases, and cases to guess what legal issues are raised in the document reviewed. It certainly makes the process of document review more efficient, but it's not revolutionary.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#66

Post by lern_too_spel »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #57
entee wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. So much this. One big problem with AI/ML as is currently eating the world is that it's just a really fancy averaging engine. It memorizes (incredibly, beautifully, superhumanly) but it doesn't really actually understand. There's a whole spate of "lets trick the AI" in image processing, I have to believe that there are easy ways to do the same with text. That said, one counterargument could be that obfuscating a…

>There's a whole spate of "lets trick the AI" in image processing Check out this "let's trick the human" in image processing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

"Let's trick the human" is already a large part of law.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#67

Post by zombieprocesses »

nopinsight wrote: post #19
mrleiter wrote: post #9

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to…

The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specia…

> The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client.

For every 1 lawyer in front of a client or jury, there are dozens if not hundreds of lawyers doing grunt work. The vast majority of legal work is reading documents. That's what most lawyers do and it pays well. If that goes, it's going to put a significant pressure on profession and wages.

It's going to be great for the top lawyers at top firms as they can charge more, work more clients and their overhead drops significantly.

Should be interesting how things pan out.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#68

Post by nubbins »

nopinsight wrote: post #19
mrleiter wrote: post #9

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to…

The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specia…

As a lawyer I'm extremely skeptical about this contract reading software displacing any lawyers any time soon, like in the next 10 years. This isn't because I question the abilities of the tech (though I do), rather its for the simple reason that I see so much more low hanging fruit for automation that still exists in the industry compared to reading contracts. Also this situation hasn't changed much in my 6+ years so I guess lawyers are able to charge for a certain amount of inefficiency, though I believe there was a huge wave of eDiscovery and subsequent eDiscovery automation layoffs in the 2000s, and the jobs outlook is probably not positive, more like neutral at best.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#69

Post by neuralzen »

This is one of the reasons I think Agrello will be a successful project, as it aims to have an AI engine process legal contracts into smart contracts. Granted it currently still currently requires a lawyer of a particular region to create an interpretive template.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#70

Post by terminalcommand »

The AI could really help in due dilligence which is usually left for the youngest associates/trainees. By the nature of the work, you have to review and summarize thousands of documents. And as this process takes a long time, you cannot charge the standard rates to the client. Instead you work overtime without charging anything thus receiving no extra compensation.

I remember doing a due dilligence work during one of my summer internships, where my only job was to scan documents for any non-spanish documents. If the document was in spanish and contained no suspicious names, I closed it. If not, I printed it out. I had to do this for hours and hours in the night.

I think AI would be a great fit for such tasks.

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