Introduction

Whether lawyers like it or not, new and emerging technologies are changing the way legal departments operate. To be an integral part of the business, in-house legal counsel need to strategically align their legal thinking with business outcomes, which are quantified by data and tracked by metrics, and both are captured and managed through the use of technology.

That being said, legal is still an industry with laggards in technology adoption. The technology being adopted is primarily productivity-centric (mobile, office automation) and security-centric. One study^[CLXXVIII] shows that priorities for technology investment for the legal industry consistently fall into these categories:

• Network security and firewall protection

• Hardware upgrades (mobile phones, laptops or tablets)

• Remote work technologies (video conferencing and cloud collaboration)

• BYOD policies/portable device security

The takeaway from these trends in technology investment is that the legal pro­fession remains generally focused on “KTLO” activities, otherwise known as “keeping the lights on.” These are infrastructure investments in office automation and communications, so lawyers can perform the functions they are currently doing more efficiently.

That same data also shows secondary investment in applications specific for legal operations. More aggressive and contemporary legal firms and legal oper­ations are implementing these technologies, including:

• Case and matter management

• ERP or business management with billing functionality and financial analytics

• eDiscovery and litigation management

• Timesheet and expense management

• CRM and customer management

• Marketing and email outreach management

• Human Resources Management (HRM)

These technologies do help lawyers work more efficiently and remove some of the paper from operations, lowering costs, shortening time for various functions, and reducing errors. If lawyers are not considering these technologies, and some are still not, they are wasting time and are less efficient than their competitors and is essentially paving the cow paths to improve performance.

But there is an entirely new type of software, very different than office auto­mation or efficiency tools, and it changes the way lawyers work. It leverages a new set of technologies referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and combines Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help lawyers change what they do in their engagement with clients, not just make what they do more efficient. In the legal world where time is literally money (at a hefty hourly rate), being able to solve challenges with the aid of AI is critical.

So what do all those techy terms mean for us lawyers? They essentially mean that you can now teach the software the way you would teach a junior associate a new discipline. You provide it with examples (can be positive and negative) to allow it to learn how to find the relevant information. No more key word search (although you can still do that), no proximity searches (although that's in there too)—we are talking about learning about the types and styles of language used through semantic analysis and Deep Neural Networks. Neural Networks and semantic analysis instructs the software to recognize when different words and sentence structures mean the same thing.

This new technology:

Allows lawyers to remove manual, tedious and error prone document capture, review and data extraction/management functions;

• shortens processing time and lowers labor review costs for clients, as it allows the highly trained lawyers to spend more time providing high value services to clients vs. coordinating and managing manual document reviews or data ana­lysis; and

• forces lawyers and their clients to rethink the traditional methods and scope of information capture.

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