Legal Analytics: How Analytics and AI Are Disrupting the Legal Industry

The first question everyone may be asking is: What on earth is legal analytics? Legal analytics concerns the leveraging of data and algorithms to support decision-making. It can also be used to help automate legal tasks and make various legal processes more efficient. While we have seen the application of AI and analytics in other industries, we have started seeing disruption in the legal sector in recent years. Thus, this blog will discuss the top three examples of how AI and Analytics have disrupted and continue to disrupt the legal practice’s status quo.


 

Text Mining

One of the most compelling examples of AI and analytics in the legal industry is its ability to process copious amounts of text. Currently, we are witnessing legal text analytics being applied to contracts in areas such as employment law, wills and estate, and family law. In the past, you would enlist an army of legal associates to sift through hundreds of contracts and terms and subsequently enter clauses into a spreadsheet. Now, some companies use pre-trained NLP (Natural Language Processing) models to review clauses and term dates from a database of commercial contracts. We can now begin to extract insights and find other uses from contracts that took hundreds of hours of the workforce to construct, such as when the contract will expire or assessing the dollar value associated with the contract in a day’s work. These innovations reduce a business’s costs and free up your lawyer’s time by utilizing AI and analytics, allowing them to dedicate more energy to a business’s specific legal needs. 
 

Business Development

One of the more interesting ways to exploit AI, which few people think about, is using machine learning to identify high-value business opportunities. Like any other business, sales are essential. This is where AI comes in. Through a data-driven analysis, AI can help firms identify the hot-ticket clients that the firm needs to prioritize and address foremost, to win that business. By harnessing predictive analytics, firms can score all inbound leads to identify the opportunities that will have the most significant impact. This can create a ‘first-mover advantage’ by getting you in touch with key clients sooner than your competitors, who may still be manually sorting through their leads and clients. 
 

Predicting Trial Outcomes

In the courtroom, we know many variables are at play that can affect the trial's outcome. Legal professionals always want to see the case’s specifics when developing a trial strategy. For instance, people want information on the judge, the opposing counsel, and how often the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff or defendant in specific scenarios. This information supports our decision-making process throughout the legal process. If we have a history of all these factors, legal professionals can take it further and use AI to predict a case’s outcome accurately. By analyzing precedents (previous court rulings), teams and their respective clients are now armed with information that can offer a certain level of confidence, all thanks to AI. 

As we can see, there are many existing uses and growing applications for AI in the world of Legal Technology. We are only scratching the surface of the possible innovations that will disrupt this industry. For example, we have seen new advances from companies using AI to generate legal memorandums daily or use automation in contracts to attract new customers in previously untapped markets. As more advancements in AI occur, we will see new opportunities and solutions that will change how we practice law from here on out. 



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