Who put the artificial in artificial intelligence?

Legal AI - Scaling Human Expertise

It’s more productive to think about AI as a way of scaling human expertise. Legal AI can be really effective when it is trained by humans to learn a particular skill or expertise.

A good example of a specific expertise or skill is something like the ability to extract parties from a contract. It's well-defined and has a tangible outcome so the machine's performance can be measured and benchmarked against human performance.

The Legal AI system has learnt the skill once its performance is comparable to human performance. The Legal AI system can then be deployed and the skill can be scaled in a relatively easy and efficient way using the cloud.

Depending on how costly mistakes are, humans can also be included in the workflow for quality assurance and review. A holistic solution will aim to embed Legal AI in existing workflows rather than try to automate everything.

Lawyers and Legal AI

Lawyers will never be replaced by machines. Instead, machines will help lawyers scale their expertise so they can focus on more important things. It will just take creative thinking and stepping outside of the box to realise which skills can be scaled and how.