Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence simply put is the science behind a machine that makes it operate using human intelligence. For Andreas Kaplan&Micheal Haeniein, it is a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data and to use those to achieve specific goals and task through flexible adaptation. Artificial Intelligence is based on the principle that a machine can be built and programmed to mimic defined human intelligence and execute tasks.
In the legal profession, Artificial Intelligence popularly known as A1 has already found its way into supporting lawyers and clients alike. The growing interest in applying A1 in law is said to be slowly transforming the profession and closing in on the work of paralegals, legal researchers and litigators. A1 now helps lawyers perform due diligence and research, provide shortcuts through analytics and automating creative processes in legal work. With the kind of AI enabled online, online resources and platforms now available, searching through huge amount of information has become easier to prepare for a legal case.
A1 may be making us smarter, but I keep wondering, it is going to replace human intelligence? According to Deloitte, 114,000 legal jobs are likely to be automated in the next 20 years. In the United States a system is designed called Wevorce. It’s an AI equipped online divorce solution system. It allows couples to define the ideal results they want to achieve and then the system will show them some models to make their decisions. This will not just cut the time and legal cost invested; but eventually start to impact legal professionals.
Lane Lillquist, the co-founder of legal tech company sees robot lawyers, aka artificial Intelligence being used in the legal profession akin to the simple tools that make every day life easier and more productive, along the lines of spell check or autocorrect. According to Lillquist, the role of lawyers is still vital to conducting quality legal work inspite of the use of AI is a tool, having a good tool does mean we are going to have less people doing an ever increasing amount of work. Enabled by technology, lawyers are more productive, allowing more legal matter to be represented around the world. In the words of Lillquist, “Deep legal expertise is required to create technology that successfully operates in the legal space, and that knowledge resides in humans”. AI can only do what it is narrowly trained to do. It is not creatively thinking about all angles of a problem.
A1 is the future which has now become a part of our present. The sooner we identify and accept its growing impact, the better prepared we will be for what it will bring next. An Artificial Intelligence – human paired team can accomplish more than either humans or machines are able to accomplish on their own. The goodnews about Artificial Intelligence in the legal profession is that, it won’t replace lawyers, but lawyers who use Artificial Intelligence will replace those who don’t.

Nkechi Bright Ewere