Peer to Peer Magazine

16 of documentation that corporate clients find reassuring when they are trying to understand what they are paying for. With respect to email, AI is capable of analyzing thousands of emails in seconds. It can automatically recognize and capture the billable time lawyers spend interacting with different clients, prioritize the most important and urgent emails so lawyers can focus on their content, and efficiently organize emails for the entire firm to ensure emails are securely stored, easy to find and managed in a way that is fully compliant. Even if firms don't end up billing the client for all the time their lawyers spend on every email related to a particular matter, AI technolo working in the background can capture the details of those activities and automate the organization of inboxes and email folders based on an individual lawyer's actual behavior over time. This is something machine learning is very good at, and it won't be long before the organization using such technolo has a body of data that reveals with remarkable precision how individual lawyers are spending their time. AI is not just another application AI can be used to measure, analyze and optimize just about any legal workflow. Deployed over time, it can provide valuable insight to help organizations operate more efficiently and competitively. AI can even make predictions to inform a broad spectrum of tactical and strategic decision-making. Consider, for example, the value to be offered by a program that can identify which clients that consume the most non-billable time, which lawyers are most efficient at performing specific kinds of tasks, which tasks create the most administrative drag, or which matter types or practice areas are eroding the firm's bottom line, and why. Because AI technologies like machine learning get "smarter" as they are exposed to more data, the precision with which they produce predictive insights related to costs, workflows and operations increases with time. Conclusion AI is not designed or destined to take over the truly valuable and highly complex work performed by lawyers. Its promise lies instead in its ability to automate many of the "small," tedious and organizational tasks that consume too much of a lawyer's time and ener. Burdening lawyers with these ministerial tasks is not only unproductive, it also diverts their attention from their true purpose: providing clients with real value and favorable outcomes. The inability of firms to efficiently manage email and time capture is symptomatic of a broader problem in the profession. Our technolo focus needs to undergo a shift – from applications to data, from tools to insights. That is what advanced technologies like AI are poised to do, and the firms that understand this will be in the best position to thrive in an increasing digital and global marketplace. ILTA

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