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I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | C O R P O R A T E L E G A L D E P A R T M E N T S 14 AI can also help us better understand workflow and operational bottlenecks, shedding light on which tasks create the most administrative drag. H O W T H E F U T U R E O F A I , A U T O M A T I O N A N D D A T A W I L L I M P A C T G E N E R A L C O U N S E L S screen. It's a lot like having a slot machine in front of you. Behavioral scientists and researchers tell us it takes around 20 to 25 minutes to re-engage with a task that we were previously involved with after being distracted by another task or another process. Smarter automation using AI is already being implemented to minimize these distractions and is allowing knowledge workers and other professionals to focus on the most substantive tasks before them. At home, we outsource dishes and laundry to the dishwasher and the washing machine, because all of these little chores can cause us to neglect activities that genuinely matter to us, like spending time with family. Why not at work? In our jobs, we spend so much time performing mundane tasks, we lack the proper focus to engage deeply with colleagues or carefully work through the ideal outcomes of a legal transaction. Automation that works "intelligently" in the background and learns from our behavior without requiring our intervention will allow us to refocus on important tasks and eliminate the cognitive deficits caused by attention residue and context switching. AI is poised to make law firms and legal departments more efficient and achieve better legal outcomes by making the "small" decisions for us and allowing lawyers to bring more focus to the complex, higher-value work we do. Think of how Amazon makes informed product recommendations that improve incrementally over time. In much the same way, lawyers will begin to trust technolo to take over basic tasks such as auto-filing of documents and email for compliance. The goal is to arrive at a form of "augmented" intelligence that combines targeted technolo with the best of human critical thinking. Deploying AI doesn't mean technolo will be replacing human beings. Instead, it will enrich their capabilities and capacities to get on with more deliberate and value- based activities and processes. AI will help us mine the data generated in the process of doing everyday work, to provide enhanced business intelligence that inform better decisions-making across operations. AI technologies like machine learning improve as they are exposed to more data. The precision with which they produce predictive insights (related to costs, workflows and operations) will continue to increase dramatically as more data continues to flow in. For example, legal departments may be struggling to make accurate predictions of legal spend and to plan accordingly. Powerful AI technologies can analyze a large body of relevant historical data and quickly yield meaningful insights. It can predict the amount of time a particular matter or project is likely to take, for example, and then help leadership make better decisions regarding the allocation of staffing resources. AI can also help us better understand workflow and operational bottlenecks, shedding light on which tasks create the most administrative drag, for instance, or which matter types or practice areas are eroding the department's bottom line. It can even assist in discovery of compliance matters. When we start collecting legal department or a law firm data in a near-autonomous, automatic way, we suddenly have the ability to present to various stakeholders (at both the enterprise level and the

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