The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/696855
60 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SUMMER 2016 with regulatory burdens. Cognitive technologies offer a way out as one of the few means of potentially managing the sheer level of global complexity taking hold. Growing in Scale and Complexity Thomson Reuters Risk Management Solutions tracked over 50,000 regulatory changes and updates globally in 2015. The regulatory environment is continually shiing, thanks to a continuous stream of new legislation, changing political priorities and newly emerging threats. And the pace of change continues to accelerate, driven by pressures to reduce risks such as money laundering and terrorism financing. More significant, the regulatory landscape is not only expanding in scale, but also in complexity, as regulatory focus reaches into areas such as cybersecurity, cross-border data transfers and financial technology. Cognitive computing has drawn headlines for aention-geing feats such as IBM Watson defeating Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, prompting the defeated champion to waggishly "welcome our new computer overlords." More recently, Google's AlphaGo defeated a top-ranked master of Go, a game considered orders of magnitude more complex than chess. In more practical applications, cognitive technologies are poised to revolutionize tasks across the entire legal workflow, including case analysis and management, legal research, contract analysis, business development and much more. One of the most important legal applications for cognitive technologies lies in dealing with the growing morass of global regulatory and compliance issues. The complexity and pace of change is reaching a level where it is increasingly difficult to keep up with current technologies and processes. Organizations are playing defense, scrambling to keep up and jeisoning businesses and markets rather than deal Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how legal work gets done. Sometimes referred to as cognitive computing or cognitive technologies, they are technologies that use various combinations of machine learning, pattern recognition, natural language processing and other processes to mimic human thought processes and analyses. by Eric Laughlin