By Mike Susong, From Legaltech News

Industry experts discuss the progress of the commoditization and automation in the legal field.

Legaltech News recently spoke with several industry luminaries to discuss their predictions for the next 12 months in legal technology. Naturally, it was impossible to not also take the opportunity to ask them about the long term. What do the next five or 10 years have in store? Read on for a glimpse into the legal tech future.

Automating the work of lawyers and legal professionals has long been the focus of these types of discussions—even before we watched a computer named Watson trounce its human opponents on Jeopardy.

One of the fundamental functions of an attorney is spotting an unseen issue, pitfall or anomaly. And we don’t yet know the extent to which all legal issues can be seen and resolved without humans. This appears to be the key question at the crux of the issue for the future of the profession and technology’s role in it.

But before we surrender entirely to the robot overlords, Norm Thomas, senior vice president of corporate development at Litera and former market development director for Microsoft’s enterprise legal and professional services division, predicts an increase in commoditized services by top law firms.

“In next few years, we might find the commoditization of legal services being embraced by some leading law firms,” Thomas told Legaltech News. “Rather than competing with LegalZoom and the like, some firms might provide self-service capabilities to their premium customers as a way of keeping them onboard. The thing about law, it’s always adding more complexity on top. The lower more repeatable areas of legal services are always going to be commoditized. I think it’s the law firms that are embracing both directions that will be the winners in the long run.”

The recently appointed vice president of solutions for Prosperoware, Ben Weinberger, is ready to embrace a machine-learning future.

“There are lawyers who say it’s not going to happen; Watson isn’t going to take my job,” Weinberger said. “It will take more time but Watson is a great example of where things can go. In fact, things have already gone that way in the context of litigation. No one does manual review anymore. Manual document review is dead or should be dead. If you are not using a tool, you are a huge risk to you and to your client because you can’t help but miss something.”

According to Weinberger, the nature of those tools will continue to evolve based on AI and the concepts that drive AI. “Artificial intelligence isn’t just about a robot that can speak to you and serve you food,” quipped Weinberger.

“It’s about intelligent analytics. It’s about algorithms to search through mountains of data and knowing what to look for. It’s about programming and about understanding what we can find in those mounds of data. Law firms already have a ton of data and they have ways to dig through it. The most efficient way to get through is automated systems that are programmed intelligently to look for patterns. That’s the AI we are talking about right now—asking questions in an intelligent, informed and educated manner that are based on prior history and outcomes to deliver the correct result.”

Where does Weinberger believe that will leave the industry? “It will be partners with relationships at the top level who manage client service. But instead of teams of associates, they will have computers and a few associates who help drive things along. We just need the horsepower behind the data and an understanding of what we are trying to slice and dice. That’s where Watson comes in; IBM was absolutely putting their stake in the ground and saying ‘this is us doing big data and analytics.’ It was a direct response to Oracle, who was doing it their own way. Watson is simply a ton of data chucked into some very heavy duty horsepower with the right analytics applied to it.”

With all of that data and processing power, Weinberger still understands the need for the human element. It’s not infallible, that’s the beauty of it, he said. “This is why for a good long time we will still need a lawyer to oversee everything, because there will be nuance; there always is.”

A good example is the Watson Final Jeopardy fail. The question was simple, “This U.S. city’s largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.”

Watson guessed Toronto.

Weinberger explained, “The big problem wasn’t that it was wrong, but it didn’t meet the basic premise of the question—which U.S. city. Imagine how much better Watson would have been if someone was overseeing the output and could easily say ‘oops, Toronto, that’s not a U.S. city, go to the next best answer.’ That said, Watson still wiped the floor with the best humanity had to offer.”

Frank Gilman, chief information officer at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, agrees that the ever-increasing processing power behind Big Data will be a game changer.

For more on this story go to: http://www.legaltechnews.com/id=1202744780782/Legal-Tech-Tomorrowland-Experts-Make-Predictions-for-the-Future#ixzz3uOz3PvAD