Legal departments are working to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, however its implementation has challenges such as managing large amounts of data, getting someone to operate it, and even knowing what to use it for, experts say.

Shabbi Khan, partner at Foley & Lardner in Boston, said a lot of companies are paying high dollar to have data scientists do very specific jobs when it comes to creating and using artificial intelligence and machine learning. He said the type of pay that larger companies are paying to data scientists dissuades them from creating their own companies and “stifles innovation.”

“It's hard to find enough talent for a given vertical who are equipped to handle these machine learning types of environments,” Khan said.

Khan said one of the reasons in-house legal departments, in large, are not creating their own artificial intelligence programs is because it is expensive to do so. He explained an in-house company would need to hire their own data scientist to create and maintain the artificial intelligence or machine learning.

“As a company your argument is that 'we might save costs,' but you have to spend $100,000 to find out if you'll save anything. It is not a low-cost implementation,” Khan said. “Is it worth hiring someone to get there? Secondly, why not just leverage outside counsel to do that?”

Khan said an advantage to law firms using artificial technology and machine learning is they have access to data outside of the corporation. There is also the issue of handling that data.

“The amount of data needed for AI is substantially larger than what we're able to handle today,” said David Chan, senior patent counsel at Western Digital Corp., in a report on artificial intelligence published by Foley & Lardner earlier this week. “Think of automated vehicles, all the cars and all the technology necessary to support them. To make it work, every intersection will become a data hub. We're not ready for that.”

Bobbi Basile, managing director of HBR Consulting's legal transformation and innovation practice, however, said if companies bring artificial intelligence and machine learning into their legal departments they will have access to information from every department in the company. Rather, law firms only have the data made available to them by the firm.

Basile explained while firms have led the charge on artificial intelligence and machine learning technology in the past, legal departments have made its implementation a priority in the last year.

“Generally speaking, corporations have a harder time bringing in technology at a rapid pace just because of the budgeting process,” Basile said.

She explained, however, legal departments need to first understand what they want to use the technology for.

“A lot of organizations want to sprint before they crawl,” Basile said. “Organizations need to first determine what business problem they want to solve or which service they want to enhance.”