Peer to Peer Magazine

35 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Forget About Robot Lawyers…This Is the First Way AI Will Affect Legal Practitioners FEATURES David Moran, Wolter Kluwer's Senior Director of Product Management, Legal Analytics, explains: "We work with the clients to ask 'What's your strategy with your law firms? What's the kind of relationship you want to convey?' This offering provides a two-way street that allows the law firm to say 'Here's the reason why,' or 'Let me modify my information.' It's a way of ensuring the right information gets into the system and that everyone is clear on both sides — the firm and the client — on what that information means." IBM's Solution IBM's Watson has come a long way from its Jeopardy! win and is now being used for a variety of AI-related use cases. IBM has long-standing relationships with the legal departments of large corporations and has developed a Watson-based product offering called Outside Counsel Insights. "We're adding a cognitive element by Watson being able to read the narrative within the invoices," says Hoffman-Childress. "Watson can do that comparison, bring to the forefront things that might be anomalies and flag them for more review — more human review. Watson will never be making the decisions — a human will. Watson is going to be a right-hand assistant that's going to say 'Hey, let's flag not this entire invoice, but these specific things within the invoice for you to look at.' If we can help direct reviewers' eyes to where they need to be instead of on line items one through 25, which were just fine, then it's going to be a much beer process for them." IBM plans to build on Outside Counsel Insights to deliver value in other areas of corporate legal departments. "If they want to look at how a judge rules on specific maers with specific firms and look at their internal data — at the pleadings, for example, or the summary judgments that have come out," the uses of Watson can quickly expand. "We usually have a data scientist work to see what types of details we can garner from internal data, and we use that to help train Watson. Then, of course, we have the aorneys train Watson in terms of what is deemed success." Hoffman- Childress points out that "success is not always Managing Outside Counsel Guidelines While corporations have been growing their in-house counsel groups for some time, many still rely heavily on law firms. One of the primary responsibilities of corporate legal departments is to manage outside counsel, not only from a tactical point of view but also from a financial perspective. IBM estimates that average outside counsel costs for large corporations range from $50 million to $14 billion. To define the "rules of engagement," corporations issue outside counsel guidelines that define the terms of an agreement with a law firm. These guidelines include details such as what kinds of work will be done by paralegals, how much the corporation is willing to pay for photocopies and how many hours per day can be billed. In principle, outside counsel guidelines should lead to invoices from law firms that are in perfect compliance. In practice, they create a mountain of data that must be reviewed. "I've got one client who reviews invoices, and it takes an hour and a half per invoice," says Shawnna Hoffman-Childress, co-leader of IBM's Global Cognitive Legal team. "That corporation has 8,000 invoices that come in per month, and every in- house counsel is trying to get through them, and they just can't." To make maers worse, she notes: "No one went to law school thinking: 'I want to become a CFO and look through invoices every day.'" This kind of problem — one with large volumes of data and a defined set of rules to apply to the data — is tailor-made for AI, and Wolters Kluwer and IBM are two of the first vendors to come to market with AI-powered solutions designed to help manage outside counsel. Wolters Kluwer's Solution LegalVIEW BillAnalyzer is a recent offering from Wolters Kluwer that combines professional services with technology and aims to reduce outside legal costs by six to 10 percent. The company is building out a model that integrates with the TyMetrix 360, Passport and Passport Pro ebilling platforms and uses machine learning and human reviewers to evaluate invoices. When the technology identifies anomalies, the Wolters Kluwer account team works with the law firm to resolve or explain the issue. JOE DAVIS Joe Davis has spent 17 years in legal IT and is a member of ILTA's Information Management Content Coordinating Team. A frequent speaker and author on artificial intelligence and enterprise content management, Joe has led applications teams at several law firms and is currently consulting with a large corporate legal department. Prior to his IT career, Joe was a teacher, an entrepreneur and a DJ in a flea market. Contact him at joe@josephdavis.com. Instead of putting attorneys out of a job, AI might just enable them to do what they went to law school to do: practice law.

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