How artificial intelligence is redefining the value of legal services

Advances in artificial intelligence are
putting law firms
under increasing pressure
to demonstrate the value of their services. Cognitive computing, such as IBM's Watson (which Dentons is leveraging) or RAVN (which a global law firm will soon announce it is using), is already able to outperform people on process-based work. In one recent
RAVN case, a 1,000-contract project which took a four-person team three months to complete was finished to the same standard - and with added analytical tools - within a few hours after a 10-day one-off configuration process.

As more law firms adopt this technology, managing partners will increasingly need to consider how they will differentiate their firms' services, rather than trying to compete on cost or even speed. They will need clear value propositions with aligned staffing models, junior talent development programmes and succession plans. Millennial lawyers often complain about doing large amount of repetitive process-based work; advances in technology may well mean the end to that work. With lower overheads a direct benefit
to law firms of cognitive computing, lawyers will need to develop specialist skills to safeguard their places
in the lean teams of the future.

One way to provide clients with greater value
is to fulfil a request which has been repeatedly
made - often in vain - by general counsel. I heard
it again very recently from the person responsible for refreshing the legal panel at a Fortune 500 company. What in-house counsel really want and need is clear, pragmatic and directive advice on complex legal issues, preferably contained within a single A4 page.

Some law firms argue that a one-page summary
is far too simplistic, that all relevant case law and other issues must be discussed within a 50-page belt-and-braces document. Such an approach is certainly valuable in protecting the firm in the event of claims of professional negligence. But, it also forces in-house counsel (who are often generalists) to make 'go' or 'no-go' calls on critical business decisions based on opaque and highly complex advice.

In the long term, in-house legal teams may well decide to bypass sitting-on-the-fence law firms and work directly with cognitive computing providers to obtain analytics-based guidance on business decisions. With an increasing number of companies opting to spend more of their legal budgets in-house rather than externally, it will be up to law firms to demonstrate how they can help clients to achieve their project objectives and long-term business plans. Firms will need to leverage their specialist expertise to give clients the added value which artificial intelligence cannot (yet) deliver.

Until next time,