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An entire day at a conference on artificial intelligence and the law last week in Chicago produced this insight about how lawyers are dealing with the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence:

Many lawyers are like someone who knows he needs to buy a car but knows nothing about cars. He knows he needs to get from A to B each day and wants to get there faster. So, he is deposited at the largest auto show in the world and told, “Decide which car you should buy.”

Whether it’s at smaller conferences or at the gigantic, auto-show-like legal tech jamborees in Las Vegas or New York, the discussion of AI seems to be dominated by the companies that produce the stuff. Much less on show are people who use legal AI in their everyday lives.

At my conference, the keynote address (and two more panels) were dominated by IBM. Other familiar names in AI in the world of smart contracting and legal research were there, along with the one of the major “old tech” legal research giants. All of the products and services sounded great, which means the salespeople were doing their jobs.

But the number of people who presented about actually using AI after buying it? Just a few (including me). “We wanted to get more users,” said one of the conference organizers, who explained that lawyers are reluctant to describe the ways they use AI, lest they give up valuable pointers to their competitors.

Most of the questions and discussion from lawyers centered around two main themes:

  1. How can we decide which product to buy when there are so many, and they change so quickly?
  2. How can we organize our firm’s business model in such a way that it will be profitable to use expensive new software (“software” being what AI gets called after you start using it)?

Law firm business models are not my specialty, but I have written before and spoke last week about evaluating new programs.

Only you (and not the vendor) can decide how useful a program is, by testing it. Don’t let the vendors feed you canned examples of how great their program is. Don’t put in a search term or two while standing at a trade show kiosk. Instead, plug in a current problem or three while sitting in your office and see how well the program does compared to the searches you ran last week.

You mean you didn’t run the searches, but you’re deciding whether to buy this expensive package? You should at least ask the people who will do the work what they think of the offering.

I always like to put in my own company or my own name and see how accurate a fact-finding program is. Some of them (which are still useful some of the time) think I live in the house I sold eight years ago. If you’re going to buy, you should know what a program can do and what it can’t.

As with other salespeople in other industries, AI sales staff won’t tell you what their programs are bad at doing. And most importantly, they won’t tell you how well or how badly (usually badly) their program integrates with other AI software you may be using.

No matter how good any software is, you will need good, inquisitive and flexible people running it and helping to coordinate outputs of different products you are using.

While sales staff may have subject-matter expertise in law (it helps if they are lawyers themselves) they cannot possibly specialize in all facets of the law. Their job is to sell, and they should not be criticized for it.

They have their job to do, and as a responsible buyer, you have yours.

For more on what an AI testing program could look like and what kinds of traits the best users of AI should have, see my forthcoming law review article here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3085263

 

Lawyers need to find witnesses. They look for assets to see if it’s worth suing or if they can collect after they win. They want to profile opponents for weaknesses based on past litigation or business dealings.

Every legal matter turns on facts. Most cases don’t go to trial, fewer still go to appeal, but all need good facts. Without decent facts, they face dismissal or don’t even get to the complaint stage.Better innovation in law firms

Do law schools teach any of these skills? Ninety-nine percent do not.  Good fact-finding requires something not taught at a lot of law schools: innovation and creativity. Of course, good judges can maneuver the law through creative decisions, and good lawyers are rightly praised for creative ways to interpret a regulation or to structure a deal.

But when it comes to fact gathering, the idea for most lawyers seems to be that you can assign uncreative, non-innovative people to plug data into Google, Westlaw or Lexis, and out will come the data you need.

This is incorrect, as anyone with a complex matter who has tried just Googling and Westlaw research will tell you.

The innovative, creative fact finder follows these three rules:

  1. Free Yourself from Database Dependency. If there were a secret trove of legally obtained information, you would be able to buy it because this is America, where good products get packaged and sold if there is sufficient demand for them. And Google won’t do it all. Most documents in the U.S. are not on line, so Google won’t help you. For any given person, there could be documents sitting in one of the more than 3,000 counties in this country, in paper form.
  • If you use a database, do you know how to verify the output? Is your John C. Wong the same John C. Wong who got sued in Los Angeles? How will you tell the difference? You need a battle plan. Can your researcher arrange to have someone go into a courthouse 2,000 miles away from your office?
  • How will you cope with conflicting results when one source says John C. Wong set up three Delaware LLC’s last year, and another says he set up two in Delaware and two in New York?
  1. Fight Confirmation Bias. Ask, “What am I not seeing?” Computers are terrible at the kind of thought that comes naturally to people. No risk management program said about Bernard Madoff, “His auditor can’t be up to the task because his office is in a strip mall in the suburbs.”
  • For your researchers, find people who can put themselves in the shoes of those they are investigating. Not everyone can say, “This report must be wrong. If I were in the high-end jewelry business, I wouldn’t run it out of a tiny ranch house in Idaho. Either this is a small business or Idaho’s not the real HQ.” If someone doesn’t notice a discrepancy as glaring as this, they are the wrong person to be doing an investigation that requires open-mindedness.
  1. Don’t paint by numbers. Begin an investigation on a clean sheet of paper. Don’t base your investigation on what someone’s resume says he did. Verify the whole thing.
  • Look not just at what’s on the resume, but look for what was left off Jobs that didn’t go well, and people who don’t like the person.
  • Despite that your client tells you, they don’t know everything (if they did they wouldn’t hire you). If your client thinks you will never find a subject’s assets outside of Texas, look outside of Texas anyway. You owe it to your client.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.

We don’t usually think of the law as the place our most creative people go. Lawyers with a creative bent often drift into business, where a higher risk tolerance is often required to make a success of yourself. Some of our greatest writers and artists have legal training, but most seem to drop out when their artistic calling tells them law school isn’t for them.

Group of Robots and personal computer vector illustration

Still, creativity and innovation are all the rage in law schools today. Northwestern has a concentration in it as does Vanderbilt, and Harvard has a course on Innovation in Legal Education and Practice.

Like it or not, as artificial intelligence takes over an increasing number of dreary legal tasks, there will be less room for dreary, plodding minds in law firms. The creative and innovative will survive.

This doesn’t worry us, because we’ve long talked about the need for creativity in fact finding. It’s even in the subtitle of my book, The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.

The book takes up the message we have long delivered to clients: computers can help speed up searching, but computers have also made searching more complex because of the vast amounts of information we need to sort through.

  • Deadlines are ever tighter, but now we have billions of pages of internet code to search.
  • Information about a person used to be concentrated around where he was born and raised. Today, people are more mobile and without leaving their base, they can incorporate a dozen companies across the country doing business in a variety of jurisdictions around the world.
  • Databases make a ton of mistakes. E.g. Two of them think I live in the house I sold seven years ago.
  • Most legal records are not on line. Computers are of limited use in searching for them, and even less useful if figuring out their relevance to a particular matter.
  • Since you can’t look everywhere, investigation is a matter of making educated guesses and requires a mind that can keep several plausible running theories going at the same time. That’s where the creativity comes in. How do you form a theory of where X has hidden his assets? By putting yourself in his shoes, based on his history and some clues you may uncover through database and public-record research.

The idea that technological change threatens jobs is hardly new, as pointed out in a sweeping essay by former world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the Wall Street Journal.

Twenty years after losing a chess match to a computer, Kasparov writes: “Machines have been displacing people since the industrial revolution. The difference today is that machines threaten to replace the livelihoods of the class of people who read and write articles about them,” i.e. the writer of this blog and just about anyone reading it.

Kasparov argues that to bemoan technological progress is “little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many gravediggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization … Machines that replace physical labor have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds.”

The great challenge in artificial intelligence is to use our minds to manage the machines we create. That challenge extends to law firms. We may have e-discovery, powerful computers and databases stuffed with information, but it still requires a human mind to sort good results from bad and to craft those results into persuasive arguments.

After all, until machines replace judges and juries, it will take human minds to persuade other human minds of the value of our arguments.

Want to know more?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.