25 Facts About AI & Law

Earlier this week I read the article “25 facts about AI & Law you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) by Micha Grupp at Medium.com.   I think it is an important article; and I want to post a summary and recommend that, if you are interested, read the entire article as it applied to the courts as well.

Mr. Grupp starts the article by stating:

“In law, AI is still all the talk. Most of it is slightly or utterly incorrect. Discoveries in recent years have little impact on the automation of legal work and the legal industry. Legal reasoning is different from other fields— technology should reflect this.”

I agree and so here is the very brief summary of the sections of his article.

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1. There is no “AI” – there are neural networks, Bayesian networks, expert systems, and machine learning.

2. “Legal Tech” is not Legal AI.  Legal Tech.  It is whatever you want it to be.

3. AI in the legal field is not new.  I went to the AI and the Law Conference two summers ago. 

There were multiple participants who have been working on the general subject area for decades.

4. There is an entire field of research dedicated to AI and law.  And it has come to an end.  The article explains that in “the end scientists in continental Europe used the term “Legal Informatics” and made it clear that it was exclusively about researching “technology in legal reasoning” in order to differentiate from the “law in technology” areas (like data protection, privacy, media law, etd.)”.

5. We are not really in a “new era”.  We are just living another hype. See: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/5-trends-emerge-in-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2018/

6. This is not the first AI Hype.  It is just a more elaborate one.  The “substantial breakthrough” was “only true for neural networks that require huge sets of data – not necessarily for all the other technologies”.

7. The AI hype is invented and fueled by businesses (requisite “Dilbert” cartoon - https://dilbert.com/strip/2016-06-21 )

8. This is true for the legal world, too.  There is an AI and Law Hype.

9. Legal thinking is different.  Law is more than cat pics.

10. The “new” AI-achievements in other industries don’t really help lawyers.

11. What about all the document analysis tools? – not really AI but actually neural nets (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network )  The author also points to the works of Sven Koerner of “ThingsThinking” which looks pretty cool - https://www.thingsthinking.net/

12. They have been here all the time – it just wasn’t time.  The tools have been around for a while, it just needed data such as the “mass adoption” of Document Management Systems”.

13. Missing from the article web page...
14. Missing?
15. Missing?

16. We do NOT have the necessary data for training legal machine learning algorithms (Part 1: Formalization).  This is the reason why I have still been focused upon building core systems and data… but that is me. We can also focus on creating structure up front (he mentions LegalRuleML ) for the legal and court documents just like we have recently written about here and here. 

17. We do NOT have the necessary data for training legal machine learning algorithms (Part 2: Labels).  I do think however that the courts may be able to help with case categorization and additional CMS information that may help with labels.

18. We do NOT have the necessary data for training legal machine learning algorithms. (Part 3: Data Quality)

19. We do NOT have the necessary data for training legal machine learning algorithms (Part 4: Ontological Data)  The author argues that “there have been close to no semantic structures in truly powerful AI applications”… yet.

20. We do NOT have the necessary data for training legal machine learning algorithms (Part 5: World Knowledge) – he writes “Finally, we need world knowledge to truly automate legal reasoning. To keep it simple, this means to extend the aforementioned ontologic semantic structure to an even greater extend to anything else in the world. Cars. Companies. Coal. Cocoa. Calcium.”

21. The biggest challenge to Automation is ROI — this is what should worry you.  But really not, the author argues that the legal professional’s job is safe since it is cheaper and easier for a person to apply legal reasoning to document/information sets.

22. Whatever you read in a non-tech newspaper/blog about AI is probably incorrect.

23. Simple IT-Automation pulls in a lot more in sales than AI.  - "Don’t believe me? Ever heard of UI Path? Outsystems? Celonis? Airtable? AutomationAnywhere? Productive Mobile?”  UI Path grew to a $7 billion dollar valuation in five years."

25. Smart Contracts are not smart.  He explains.

The author concludes ... with my full endorsement:

“If you are a visionary and want to change the world, why not focus on what we really and urgently need: VoIP for the public sector. Document Management Systems for the public sector. Digital Signatures for the legal sector. Digital, secure, scalable communication between law firms and institutions. Really good OCR. Something better than document automation. Sounds boring? Yes, I know. It’s much less fun than AI-infused fantasies and so much more burdensome. That’s why we need to tackle it all the more.”

Well done Micha.  A lot to think about?