Artificial intelligence has gained a lot of traction in recent years. While its use has exploded in other industries, this technology is still in its infancy in the legal sector.
Legal professionals have always been very slow in embracing new technologies, and sadly the use of AI is consistent with this stereotype.
But what is the current state of development of AI in regards to practicing law, can it deliver, or is it all just hype?
The Current Situation
If you follow the news about the landscape of legal technology, you get the impression that lawyers are embracing AI with open arms and that almost everyone is using it to its full potential.
While legal pros are certainly not strangers to tech, the number of users in the legal industry is still quite low. For example, only 27% of lawyers are using AI to conduct legal research right now.
This means you can leverage the slow adoption of AI in your favor. By getting rid of any inefficiencies in your work or coming up with better strategies, you can use AI to stand apart from your competition.
It can help you save time and money, as well as increase the quality of your output which will ultimately let you focus on what matters most – improving client relations.
The next four AI-powered legal software solutions can help you achieve those benefits easily.
1. Contract Review
The fact that a single mistake in your contract can spell a disaster for your law firm makes the process of double-checking and editing contracts a time-intensive endeavor.
So how do we mitigate future risks while also saving a lot of time when dealing with legal documents?
The answer is AI software for law firms.
AI contract review can significantly speed up the process of editing and analyzing contracts by ‘’recognizing’’ and highlighting every important term in the text. All the details are highlighted and categorized, eliminating the need to sift through the contract manually and looking for mistakes.
Aside from doing contract reviews, software solutions such as Loio can also easily fix a multitude of styling issues such as numbering and bulleting.
With AI-powered software, your contracts will always be free of mistakes and look tidy at the fraction of the time needed to produce them.
2. Legal Research
As the technology behind natural language processing (NLP), AI has also become the ultimate way of doing legal research.
Lawyers have been using online legal databases for a long time, crafting complicated search terms to get the best results. Still, it was always a hit-or-miss process. The advancements in NLP stop the communication breakdown between humans and computers from even occurring.
With it, you can frame search queries using everyday language instead of using a precise string of search terms that still come up with unsatisfactory results. What’s even better is that NLP will continue to learn with every reviewed case, so this method of research is going to become even more precise over time.
This AI method has drastically improved the process of legal research as lawyers can now conduct research faster with more accurate and complete results.
3. Legal Billing
The grueling task of billing and invoice processing was way due for some changes.
Reviewing invoices is something that needs a lot of time and attention as mistakes can happen very often. This is why AI-enabled legal billing can be a lifesaver.
With software that takes advantage of machine learning (ML) techniques, you can finally stop wasting valuable hours going through line items in search of errors and non-compliance.
Your invoices will be reviewed automatically, while your only job will be the approval and adjustment of flagged invoices.
4. Predictive Analytics
If you want to make more informed choices and avoid hunches or any kind of flawed personal assumptions, you can make use of all the legal data available to make informed predictions on the outcome of future events.
AI can quickly go through large volumes of information and make a data-driven forecast of the outcome. Facts that are taken into consideration include behaviors of particular judges and how they ruled on the case similar to yours.
It’s not only the predictions of rulings. Clients also often want to know how long will it take for the case to be concluded, how likely is a positive outcome in court and should the case be settled beforehand. Data and AI can help you answer those questions.
It’s Not Really Science Fiction
AI legal technology sounds like science fiction (especially when described by the media) that only the big cats are using. The truth of the matter is that lawyers are back to their old ways of distrusting new technology despite it being readily available.
You can use this fact to your advantage and finally make an effort to stand out from your competition. With AI legal software, you can change the way you approach repetitive tasks, how you prepare for cases and the strategies you use in litigation.
It’s not a magic bullet that will do all the work for you though, but it can certainly help you finally break free of traditions that are holding the industry back. You are still the protagonist in this story and right now, AI can be a perfect little helper.