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Anyone following artificial intelligence in law knows that its first great cost saving has been in the area of document discovery. Machines can sort through duplicates so that associates don’t have to read the same document seven times, and they can string together thousands of emails to put together a quick-to-read series of a dozen email chains. More sophisticated programs evolve their ability with the help of human input.

Law firms are already saving their clients millions in adopting the technology. It’s bad news for the lawyers who used to earn their livings doing extremely boring document review, but good for everyone else. As in the grocery, book, taxi and hotel businesses, the march of technology is inevitable.

Other advances in law have come with search engines such as Lexmachina, which searches through a small number of databases to predict the outcome of patent cases. Other AI products that have scanned all U.S. Supreme Court decisions do a better job than people in predicting how the court will decide a particular case, based on briefs submitted in a live matter and the judges deciding the case.

When we think about our work gathering facts, we know that most searching is done not in a closed, limited environment. We don’t look through a “mere” four million documents as in a complex discovery or the trivial (for a computer) collection of U.S. Supreme Court cases. Our work is done when the entire world is the possible location of the search.

A person who seldom leaves New York may have a Nevada company with assets in Texas, Bermuda or Russia.

Until all court records in the U.S. are scanned and subject to optical character recognition, artificial intelligence won’t be able to do our job for us in looking over litigation that pertains to a person we are examining.

That day will surely come for U.S records, and may be here in 10 years, but it is not here yet. For the rest of the world, the wait will be longer.

Make no mistake: computers are essential to our business. Still, one set of databases including Westlaw and Lexis Nexis that we often use to begin a case are not as easy to use as Lexmachina or other closed systems, because they rely on abstracts of documents as opposed to the documents themselves.

They are frequently wrong about individual information, mix up different individuals with the same name, and often have outdated material. My profile on one of them, for instance, includes my company but a home phone number I haven’t used in eight years. My current home number is absent. Other databases get my phone number right, but not my company.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “Kayak” type system that could compare a person’s profile on five or six paid databases, and then sort out the gold from the garbage?

It would, but it might not happen so soon, and not just because of the open-universe problem.

Even assuming these databases could look to all documents, two other problems arise:

  1. They are on incompatible platforms. Integrating them would be a programming problem.
  2. More importantly, they are paid products, whereas Kayak searches free travel and airline sites. In addition, they require licenses to use, and the amount of data you can get is regulated by one of several permissible uses the user must enter to gain access to the data. A system integration of the sites would mean the integrator would have to vet the user for each system and process payment if it’s a pay-per-use platform.

These are hardly insurmountable problems, but they do help illustrate why, with AI marching relentlessly toward the law firm, certain areas of practice will succumb to more automation faster than others.

What will be insurmountable for AI is this: you cannot ask computers to examine what is not written down, and much of the most interesting information about people resides not on paper but in their minds and the minds of those who know them.

The next installment of this series on AI will consider how AI could still work to help us toward the right people to interview.

By now, if a lawyer isn’t thinking hard about how automation is going transform the business of law, that lawyer is a laggard.

You see the way computers upended the taxi, hotel, book and shopping mall businesses? It’s already started in law too.  As firms face resistance over pricing and are looking to get more efficient, the time is now to start training people to work with – and not in fear of – artificial intelligence.

And be not afraid.
And be not afraid

There will still be plenty of lawyers around in 10 or 20 years no matter how much artificial intelligence gets deployed in the law. But the roles those people will play will in many respects be different. The new roles will need different skills.

In a new Harvard Business Review article (based on his new book, “Humility is the New Smart”) Professor Ed Hess at the Darden School of Business argues that in the age of artificial intelligence, being smart won’t mean the same thing as it does today.

Because smart machines can process, store and recall information faster than any person, the skills of memorizing and recall are not as important as they once were. The new smart “will be determined not by what or how you know but by the quality of your thinking, listening, relating, collaborating and learning,” Hess writes.

Among the many concrete things this will mean for lawyers are two aspects of fact investigation we know well and have been writing about for a long time.

  1. Open-mindedness will be indispensable.
  2. Even for legal research, logical deduction is out, logical inference is in.

Hess predicts we will “spend more time training to be open-minded and learning to update our beliefs in response to new data.” What could this mean in practice for a lawyer?

If all you know how to do is to gather raw information from a limited universe of documents, or perhaps spend a lot of time cutting and pasting phrases from old documents onto new ones, your days are numbered. Technology-assisted review (TAR) already does a good job sorting out duplicates and constructing a chain of emails so you don’t have to read the same email 27 times as you read through a long exchange.

But as computers become smarter and faster, they are sometimes overwhelmed by the vast amounts of new data coming online all the time. I wrote about this in my book, “The Art of Fact Investigation: Creative Thinking in the Age of Information Overload.”

I made the overload point with respect to finding facts outside discovery, but the same phenomenon is hitting legal research too.

In their article “On the Concept of Relevance in Legal Information Retrieval” in the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal earlier this year,[1] Marc van Opijnen and Cristiana Santos wrote that

“The number of legal documents published online is growing exponentially, but accessibility and searchability have not kept pace with this growth rate. Poorly written or relatively unimportant court decisions are available at the click of the mouse, exposing the comforting myth that all results with the same juristic status are equal. An overload of information (particularly if of low-quality) carries the risk of undermining knowledge acquisition possibilities and even access to justice.

If legal research suffers from the overload problem, even e-discovery faces it despite TAR and whatever technology succeeds TAR (and something will). Whole areas of data are now searchable and discoverable when once they were not. The more you can search, the more there is to search. A lot of what comes back is garbage.

Lawyers who will succeed in using ever more sophisticated computer programs will need to remain open-minded that they (the lawyers) and not the computers are in charge. Open-minded here means accepting that computers are great at some things, but that for a great many years an alert mind will be able to sort through results in a way a computer won’t. The kind of person who will succeed at this will be entirely active – and not passive – while using the technology. Anyone using TAR knows that it requires training before it can be used correctly.

One reason the mind needs to stay engaged is that not all legal reasoning is deductive, and logical deduction is the basis for computational logic. Michael Genesereth of Codex, Stanford’s Center for Legal Informatics wrote two years ago that computational law “simply cannot be applied in cases requiring analogical or inductive reasoning,” though if there are enough judicial rulings interpreting a regulation the computers could muddle through.

For logical deduction to work, you need to know what step one is before you proceed to step two.  Sherlock Holmes always knew where to start because he was the character in entertaining stories of fiction. In solving the puzzle he laid it out in a way that seemed as if it was the only logical solution.

But it wasn’t. In real life, law enforcement, investigators and attorneys faced with mountains of jumbled facts have to pick their ways through all kinds of evidence that produces often mutually contradictory theories. The universe of possible starting points is almost infinite.

It can be a humbling experience to sit in front of a powerful computer armed with great software and connected to the rest of the world, and to have no idea where to begin looking, when you’ve searched enough, and how confident to be in your findings.

“The new smart,” says Hess, “will be about trying to overcome the two big inhibitors of critical thinking and team collaboration: our ego and our fears.”

Want to know more about our firm?

  • Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, this one and The Divorce Asset Hunter;
  • Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon). There is a detailed section on logic and inference in the law.
  • Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here. We offer training for lawyers, and I speak across the country to legal groups about the proper mindset for legal inquiry.
  • If you are member of the ABA’s Litigation Section, see my piece in the current issue of Litigation Journal, “Five Questions Litigators Should Ask: Before Hiring an Investigator (and Five Tips to Investigate It Yourself). It contains a discussion of open-mindedness.

[1] van Opijnen, M. & Santos, C. Artif Intell Law (2017) 25: 65. doi:10.1007/s10506-017-9195-8

 

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.