Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 37 haven't been classified, you greatly increase the accuracy and relevance of the information you're pulling if you identify what type of document it is first. For example, there's no reason to try to extract the mortgage termination clause from a share purchase agreement because there's not going to be one. Practical AI makes it easy not just to extract information, but to extract it from the specific type of document that is most relevant to the task at hand. Beyond using classification and extraction internally on their own work product, law firms can also use it to more efficiently perform an array of client-facing tasks. Consider M&A due diligence. Rush projects like M&A require all hands on deck and the result can be overworked, unhappy lawyers and subpar work. With practical AI, law firms have the ability to intelligently review documents with greater accuracy and productivity. During M&A due diligence, for example, a firm might need to review thousands of employment contracts to make sure there isn't any hidden liability that could come back to haunt them. In the past, it was sometimes only practical for a firm to review a subset of these documents – say 30 percent, or some other representative slice – due to time and cost considerations. With practical AI, firms have a tool that makes it feasible to review the entirety of the available dataset, without having to skip through and tag and classify documents on their own. Making its vast trove of prior work product easier to search and re-use is particularly important for firms that are utilizing – by choice, or by client demand – fixed fee arrangements rather than the traditional billable hour. In a fixed fee arrangement, every bit of efficiency gain gets directly reflected on the bottom line, making the ability to leverage prior work that much more valuable and important. Before you can make good use of prior work, you need to actually find it – and that starts with proper classification. 2. Extract Relevant Information Quickly Once information has been properly classified, which makes it easily searchable, you can start doing some very interesting things with it – like extracting the pieces of it that you want to reuse or otherwise leverage. Practical AI enables law firms to automatically read, extract, and interpret critical business information from large volumes of documents and unstructured data. For example, law firm associates and other professionals who previously spent hundreds of hours manually extracting clauses or other key data points from documents – a process that is prone to human error – can now streamline these tasks with pre-built and self- trained extractors able to complete these tasks in less time with fewer errors. An example is helpful here in painting a picture. Suppose a request comes flying across a lawyer's desk to gather all the share purchase agreements that the firm has completed in the past two years where the value is greater than $10,000,000 and the opposing counsel was Firm X. Because all of the firm's work product has been properly classified, the lawyer can easily find those documents and start pulling important pieces of information out of them. While it's possible to extract clauses or other data points from documents that With practical AI, firms have a tool that makes it feasible to review the entirety of the available dataset, without having to skip a large subsection of the documents – any one of which might contain an important outlier than contains a high amount of risk. a large subsection of the documents – any one of which might contain an important outlier than contains a high amount of risk. Think here of the employee who, for whatever reason, has a clause in their employment contract that says they have intellectual property rights to the products a target company produces. That's a nugget of information that any firm would hope to catch during the due diligence review. Reducing overall risk and delivering better service to the client, while reducing the time and cost of the task, is a win for all parties – and it wasn't possible before practical AI. 3. Identify Expertise More Accurately Let's say a firm just opened up a new matter involving real estate development in Abu Dhabi. Now they need to harness the expertise within the firm on this subject. Today, in many firms, that process looks something like the following: the firm sends out a mass email to its entire staff asking "Who knows about real estate law in Abu Dhabi?" They might get a hit, or they might not. Maybe the person that actually is an expert doesn't get the email, or gets it but doesn't have time to read it, or simply doesn't want to volunteer the fact that they have expertise in that area. As an alternate approach, a firm could always run a keyword search on the

• Cover