Litigation
Cal. Litig. 2020, Volume 33, Number 1
Content
- From the Section Chair What We've Done and What's to Come
- Editor's Foreword the Future Is Here
- Tech Tins: Making Use of Fastcase
- McLe Article A Trial Lawyer's Guide to Rule 3.3
- The Overworked Sentence
- Reoon: on the Los Angeles County Bar Association's Federal Courts Symposium Featuring Judges of the Central District of California
- What Is the Ccpa and Why Should Litigators Care?
- Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Practice of Law
- Can Ai Sue in Federal Court?
- Current Legal Issues in Video Games and
- Embracing Evolution in the Delivery of Legal Services
- Capture the Flag: Winning With Forum Selection Clauses
- The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution By Eric Foner
- Reflections on Becoming an Appellate Lawyer Hall of Famer
- The Publication of "That Book"
- Masthead
- Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Practice of Law
By Rob Toews
Rob Toews is a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners in San Francisco. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
At close to a trillion dollars globally, legal services is one of the largest markets in the world. At the same time, it remains profoundly underdigitized. Law is tradition-bound and notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. This will change. More than any technology before it, artificial intelligence (AI) will dramatically transform the practice of law. Indeed, this process is already underway.
The law is in many ways particularly conducive to using AI and machine learning. Machine learning and law operate according to strikingly similar principles: they both look to historical examples to infer rules to apply to new situations. Among the social sciences, law may come closest to a system of formal logic. Legal rulings apply axioms derived from precedent to particular facts to reach a conclusion. This logic-oriented methodology is exactly the type of activity to which machine intelligence can fruitfully be applied. A few practice areas are particularly promising for AI.