Peer to Peer Magazine

43 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Artificial Intelligence Is Here, and You (and Your Clients) Already Love It FEATURES BENJAMIN WHETSELL Benjamin Whetsell is the co- founder of Paper Software. He is admitted to the bars of New York and Washington, D.C. Previously, he was an associate at Fried Frank in New York City, where he worked on financings, mergers, and fund structures for clients such as Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. He holds a BBA from the University of Michigan Business School and a JD from Columbia Law School. Contact him at bwhetsell@papersoftware.com. Language Generation Lawyers work with words, and this means that text is a central component of nearly every app that a lawyer uses. And when you're a busy lawyer, the more closely the words on your screen resemble what people use, the beer off you are. Take dates, for example. Deadlines are the lifeblood of litigation, so calendaring soware must present deadlines clearly. Say you have a filing due at 5 p.m. on July 12, 2017. You want your soware to show you the date like that, not something like 2017 07 12 17:00:00, which is closer to how your computer saves this data. Some applications take this a step further, including turns of phrase like "a day ago" or "just now." Defaults Most soware is customizable, yet hardly anyone does any customizing. Why? Customizing soware takes time, which is not something lawyers typically have. Most people rely on defaults. But in some soware, defaults aren't set in stone— rather, defaults change to accommodate what you are doing. The most obvious example is autocomplete. If you type "independ" into the search field of your web browser, you'll see "independent variable" as the number one hit (that is, the default) in the autocomplete menu. Say, instead, that you keep typing because you meant to search for "independent counsel." The next time you type "independ," "independent counsel" will be your new default and appear as the top hit. This is not earth-shaering, but it almost makes you feel as though your computer is remembering your searches and using this information to help you. This is the epitome of the common definition of AI. User Interface Elements of AI are also incorporated into the way soware displays information. Email is a ready example. No one wants to see an email that's an incomprehensible jumble of HTML. Under the hood, that's oen what an email is. If your email application gave you that kind of gibberish output, you'd switch to another one. Instead, email applications break down the components of a message and present them so humans AI is already present in products we encounter every day. understand, with fields like sender, subject, a snippet of message text and so on. User interfaces are also designed to display messages in a sensible way, with message chains grouped together, listed in chronological order and highlighted if they're unread. For lawyers, the ability to immediately recognize which email messages relate to a particular maer or a specific client is essential to efficient case management. This might not be as impressive as other forms of artificial intelligence, and some might dismiss it as simply an aspect of soware design. But under a loose definition of AI as analyzing data and presenting it in a human way, user interface design fits the bill. Cut and Paste Cuing and pasting is about as basic as it gets for word processing. Every lawyer relies on it and does it without even thinking when using applications like Word or PowerPoint. Drag and drop is a fancier version of the same idea—drag a picture or document from File Explorer into your brief or presentation, and you see it as the picture or document you were expecting. These techniques are taken for granted as just being how current technology works—no modern lawyer could fathom taking the time to retype boilerplate contract language. But a lot of programming had to happen for the outcome of cut and paste or drag and drop to be in a form you can recognize and use. You don't think twice about it until you try to do it and it doesn't happen. Think back to 2010 and the feeling of mild delight you got the first time you dragged something to Google Docs and something happened that made sense. You now expect apps to "think" as you do, which is also the very definition of AI. The Human Helper That Makes a Great Deal A far cry from puing lawyers out of work, AI (as it's commonly defined) makes the practice of law easier and allows lawyers to do their jobs beer by increasing accuracy and efficiency. The more "humanlike" your technology is, the more time you can spend serving your clients. Beer yet, the lower bills will keep your clients coming back with more work. P2P

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