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3 Tasks Your Firm
Couldn't Handle
Before Practical AI
B Y P E T E R W A L L Q V I S T
T
hough only 10 percent of law firms
currently say they are using AI,
many are starting to catch on that
AI – or at least practical AI solutions – can
transform the way they work for the better.
By automating and optimizing many common
tasks, practical AI enables lawyers to work
more efficiently and deliver more value to
their clients.
Here is a quick sample of tasks that
were difficult to accomplish – or, in some
cases, weren't even feasible to tackle – before
practical AI came along.
1. Classify Documents Properly
In a perfect world, a detailed profile is filled out
for every new document that is created within
a law firm. This document profile details what
kind of document it is – for example, is it a
share purchase agreement? An employment
contract? – what industry it's most relevant for,
and scores of other useful attributes. Keywords
and tags are dutifully entered to reflect the
contents of the document, so that people can
easily search on these criteria in the future
with minimal effort.
Alas, we don't live in a perfect world.
More often than not, people at law firms are
too busy to take the time to fill out document
profiles, and so these fields remain empty.
Without being properly tagged, these
documents are then quite difficult to find in
the future. The default assumption is that
lawyers and other fee earners will spend time
and effort curating their own data, but there
are only so many hours in a day – and so it
rarely happens.
Enter practical AI, which can help with
automatically classifying documents without
any human involvement. Working in the
background, AI can examine an immense
number of documents, identify what types of
documents they are based on their content,
and then classify them accordingly.
As a result, firms can better leverage all
the knowledge and work product that they
have accumulated throughout their decades
of history without having to painstakingly go
