“Big Data” was the big thing in legal a few years ago. We all remember the major hype. The fact was that Big Data in legal usually equates to a “pretty large” data set. It also usually has just a single dimension (costs). Truly, it is an insult to genome scientists to use the term Big Data when referring to legal data.

Big Data on publicly available data is easy (premonition). But, applying the Big Data concept and methodologies to data held in private databases and spanning across multiple dimensions is much more difficult. Transforming this data into useful and actionable information means taking it the necessary step further and merging it into artificial intelligence tools. This is where Big Data was never able to go in legal, and so people referred back to tried and true terms like reporting, analysis, metrics, KPIs, etc.

Recently, the obsession with Big Data in legal has been replaced with artificial intelligence. Every conference has an AI track, every vendor now “does AI” (by the way, when someone tells you they “do AI” run away fast). There are countless articles and research papers on AI in legal, and rightly so. AI has the potential to hugely impact and even transform the legal industry. The crux of legal is after all to apply a codified set of instructions (the law) into our everyday life.