Applied Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction For Business Leaders

by Mariya Yao

Current applications include drafting and reviewing contracts, mining documents in discovery and due diligence, sifting data to predict outcomes, and answering routine questions. In-house legal departments can spend 50 percent of their time reviewing contracts, creating bottlenecks that slow down business transactions. AI solutions using natural language processing (NLP) can act as spotter to provide needed information on contract terms, allowing lawyers to focus their attention on the most critical segments of each contract and shortening the overall legal clearance process. Legal teams must ensure that contracts are not hiding obligations, liabilities, or legal exposures. In addition, legal teams must also stay up-to-date with ever-changing compliance rules. AI-powered due diligence agents are already being used to review billions of dollars in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions as well as to extract and manage data of multinational corporations in multiple languages. Legal research can now be supplemented by AI-powered assistants that can review and categorize large bodies of documents, flagging the most important ones for human attention. New products, including ones making use of IBM Watson, can now respond to legal questions in plain English, even outperforming experienced legal professionals in accuracy, efficiency, and user satisfaction.