Andrew Arruda

Legal Week Intelligence, in association with Fulcrum GT, recently published the first edition of its Top 20 Legal IT Innovators report, which profiles the law firm leaders, in-house lawyers and tech pioneers driving change in the legal profession.

Click here to download the report from Legal Week Law (free registration required).

Andrew Arruda describes himself as an entrepreneur, strategist and leader, with nearly a decade of experience in the legal industry. He is also a licensed attorney, who "knows the ins and outs of the legal profession and aims to forever change the way legal services are delivered".

He plans to do this through ROSS Intelligence, which he co-founded in 2014. ROSS is "the world's first artificially intelligent attorney", built using IBM's Watson. It understands natural language legal questions and provides expert answers instantly, along with other relevant information – cutting down substantially on legal research time and energy.

Prior to ROSS Intelligence, Arruda worked at Toronto litigation boutique, Azevedo & Nelson, and with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development in Portugal. But in the last year, ROSS and Arruda have been featured everywhere from the BBC to CNBC, The New York Times to The Financial Times.

So how did ROSS start out? "The genesis wasn't from me," says Arruda. "It came originally from a Texan, Jimoh Ovbiagele, who was transferred to the University of Toronto, which has arguably the world's leading AI department. He called me one day and said: 'what do you think about building a system that would bring the power of AI to the law and that would allow lawyers to instantly update the information that they need to do their job?'

"I ended up leaving my law firm. We moved into a basement and maxed out our credit cards to fund our early days." They started in Toronto, where "they got a ton of interest from the law firms", says Arruda, before moving to Palo Alto in mid-2015, where they got some funding help from Y Combinator – early funders to Airbnb among others.

ROSS bankruptcy was the first product. "There are tight guidelines and bankruptcy is a perfect way to show ROSS can be used in a pinch," says Arruda. Like humans, it can learn and contextualise, getting smarter the more you use it.

He explains: "ROSS harnesses the power of natural language processing. When a user asks a (hypothetical) legal research question, just as they would ask a lawyer, it analyses, compares and contrasts the words and sees the relationships those words have on each other, much like humans do, and therefore it uncovers the intent of the question itself."

ROSS is 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' …it understands natural language legal questions and provides expert answers instantly

ROSS can therefore "understand what you're asking, and it's trying to aim at the why you're asking it". After layering on machine learning, it continues to learn – "essentially try to mimic the way we as humans learn things".

As to how ROSS has the capacity to draw inferences and formulate hypotheses, the answer, says Arruda, "is a very complicated process that uses hundreds of different algorithms". He adds: "The way to boil that down simply: what it is trying to do is decipher different things and add on a different weighting system." Going back to the hypothetical question, "it brings back the passages of law it feels most confident answer your question".

Unlike some gloomy forecasters who predict AI will ultimately mean the end of lawyers, Arruda thinks that it "will actually make humans more human".

He sees ROSS and AI more broadly "as a really powerful tool for positive change in society", because it will save money on legal research time. He points to the 80% of Americans "who if they need a lawyer, can't afford one".

As a legal tool, ROSS is sold as a cost and time saver. It is being rapidly developed and has already been tested by hundreds of lawyers in multiple law firms. BakerHostetler was one of the first big names to sign up, followed more recently by Latham & Watkins.

In terms of cost, there is no published fixed tariff. But Arruda is keen to point out: "We made Ross to be able to be used by solo practitioners, small, medium and large law firms – so it's very affordable. We like to peg the monthly charge at roughly what it would cost for an hour of a lawyer's time on average, with the logic that using Ross is going to be saving you countless hours a month."

For a technical innovation to work commercially, the market has to buy. Arruda is confident that they will: "I like to think that ROSS will certainly become a ubiquitous piece of technology for the law firms that exist in the future. Our goal right now is to put ROSS into the hands of every lawyer across the world."