Digital White Papers

47 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Revolutionizing the Practice of Law through Data Science science team mapped out this workflow and identified several potential optimization points. Now the proposed contract is emailed to an AI bot we built that isolates and analyzes key terms which are compared to the model terms. Differences are presented to the aorney in an on-screen review module along with recommended modifications. The aorney makes edits to the contract and the bot automatically tracks changes and versions and spits out an annotated dra. The other contracting party is notified and can log in to view the edits, propose its own changes and comments or accept the changes. Once all terms are agreed, a final contract is created and delivered for execution. The bot's AI learns from the edits made by each party and improves its recommendations over time. This optimized process has saved more than half the time normally spent by our aorneys on each contract. We have been able to pass along significant savings to our client and greatly improve efficiency and reduce risk. The Billable Hour vs. Per Task Billing But, some wonder, why save time when that cuts into billable hours and reduces overall revenue? And here we come to the spectre of the billable hour, the holy relic of law firm practice. Typically the base unit of revenue, it is also how the performance of partners and associates has been measured for hundreds of years. It is time for the billable hour to meet its demise, or at least be relegated to its proper place. Data science and optimization creates immense efficiencies in legal processes, which usually means fewer hours spent on a task. If you bill by the hour, the efficiencies gained are given away to the client with no benefit to the law firm; this gives no incentive to law firms to innovate. Both service provider and client should benefit from gains in efficiency, which can only be done by changing how we bill for tasks from an hourly model to a per task model. In the example above suppose that reviewing and editing a typical contract took four hours and now takes two. The benefit of the two hours saved should be shared between the law firm and the client. The firm bills a fee per task equivalent to three hours of work and the client benefits by saving the cost of an hour. The incentives for client and firm are aligned, and both benefit. The aorneys working on this task are credited with the profit from this task, not just the revenue. Ethic and the Lawyer/Data Scientist Improving how we deliver legal products and services is just one benefit a lawyer/data scientist can bring to his or her firm and clients. A lawyer/data scientist has both a unique capability and a responsibility for thinking about ethical issues involved in the use of algorithms and Both service provider and client should benefit from gains in efficiency, which can only be done by changing how we bill for tasks from an hourly model to a per task model.

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