Peer to Peer Magazine

40 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2016 FEATURES Artificial Intelligence Systems and the Law 10 Predictions About How IBM's Watson Will Affect Legal In an article by Paul Lippe and Daniel Martin Katz in the ABA Journal, they listed the following 10 predictions on how Watson will change the legal profession: Watson is almost certainly the most significant technology ever to come to law, and it will give lawyers permission to think innovatively and open up the conversation about what is possible in a field that has been somewhat "stuck." IBM and Sloan-Kettering have collaborated on a video talking about how Watson can help treat cancer patients better. We have no videos like that anywhere in law — maybe we should. Watson will force a much more rigorous conversation about the actual structure of legal knowledge. Statutes, regulations, how-to-guides, policies, contracts and of course case law don't work together especially well, making it challenging for systems like Watson to interpret them. This Tower of Babel says as much about the complex way we create law as it does about the limitations of Watson. Watson will open up new possibilities (and challenges) for teaching. Within a few years, many or most of the Socratic method questions that get posed in a first-year contracts class will likely be answerable by students referencing their ContractsWatson at their desk. Many professors will hate this; most will recognize it as no different from the introduction of the calculator to algebra class in 1973. Watson will lead at least a few enlightened law schools to walk down the block to engineering schools to try to integrate other disciplines into the practice of law. (See "The MIT School of Law.") Watson should make complexity more manageable concerning areas like Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or mergers and acquisitions integration, reducing the cost of law. Watson will empower younger lawyers — who are traditionally at the bottom of the hierarchy and have now been dislocated by today's job market — since they will likely be the first to embrace it. Watson will catalyze better organization of legal information and legal data, forcing organizations to better manage their current data and delivering substantial returns from this information management step alone. It will also help clarify what lawyers do and how they add value, and it will focus attention on the regulatory model for lawyers. Watson may be used as a dedicated or embedded service for specific legal workflows as much as it is as general purpose tool. Think how "smart" email programs now suggest possible addressees based on prior group emails. Watson (or something like it) will likely become a standard authoring/query model. Just as most companies today write their Web information to optimize for Google's search, professional knowledge (which is published in a multi-tier structure) will want to be better synthesized through a system like Watson and will adopt new authoring and publishing norms. Watson won't displace lawyers — it will make law more accessible and transparent, as it should be. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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