Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the Reinventing Professionals podcast, hosted by legal technology speaker and consultant Ari Kaplan, provided to Legaltech News. In this episode, Kaplan spoke with Shawnna Hoffman and Brian Kuhn, the co-founders and co-leaders of IBM Watson Legal. The duo delivered the day two keynote address at the 2017 ILTA conference.

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your ILTACON keynote message.

Brian Kuhn: Our message really focused on the practical application of AI to the legal industry, not flash or Star Wars, not the art of the possible, but what can be done and what the tools are for evaluating how to do something.

Ari Kaplan: Where are the practical aspects of AI?

Brian Kuhn: We've conducted over 100 use case identification workshops with potential clients in Asia, Europe, and North America. We used four metrics to rank the potential business benefit of a use case and then built solutions around those metrics. Where we are seeing those use cases the most is in business of law, rather than practice of law. While we are not focused on the practice of law, we are enhancing it with AI. We are focused on the business of law, such as a reduction in outside counsel spend and repurposing previous work product.

Ari Kaplan: How close are we to actual application of this technology?

Shawnna Hoffman: It is happening today. It's actually been happening for quite some time. We've been building over the past five years different legal solutions and really understanding what the marketplace was looking for. What we've found is that the biggest pain points today involve the business of law issues. It's the day-to-day things that are annoying for the attorneys to have to do. Billing, for example, is just tremendously annoying. No one goes to law school to learn how to do an invoice right. We found that 40 percent of the time the UTBMS (Uniform Task Based Management System) codes are incorrect.

Brian Kuhn: We actually invented a tool called Outside Counsel Insights to support this. 10 different lawyers would describe the same similar legal scenario and the same billable event in 10 different ways and that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. By more clearly understanding what they do, we can get a sense of what a reasonable level of effort is for a certain type of legal task and move forward with a fixed fee billing.

Ari Kaplan: What was the takeaway that you were trying to emphasize in the keynote?

Shawnna Hoffman: It definitely is the practical application of artificial intelligence and taking it in bite-sized pieces. Don't go in and try to boil the ocean. In the end, it's a piece by piece effort and trying to move the needle a bit. Most of the time, it's millions of dollars that AI can come in and save.

Brian Kuhn: I think another message was that the industry needs to come together to define a standard for the practical and ethical application of this technology, not just vendors, but the industry itself.

Ari Kaplan: How do you overcome the fear and anxiety over machines handling this?

Shawnna Hoffman: Here is the cool part about that: the jobs that we've been able to affect so far are the ones that no one wants to do. It's kind of like the industrial revolution since Watson will do the repeatable processes that you hate.