Just how big of a jump is previous legal technologies to the current age of artificial intelligence?

Andrew Arruda, CEO and co-founder of ROSS Intelligence Inc., said that it's equivalent to jumping from a Model T to modern cars. Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext, went further, saying it's “gone from crawling to driving in a Tesla” over the past five years. Aaron Crews, chief data analytics officer at Littler Mendelson, said it will lead over the next five years to “a complete change, soup to nuts, of what it means to be a lawyer.”

Seem like a load of hot air? Perhaps not. The roughly 200 people attending the “Use Cases and Applications of AI in Legal Services” session at Legalweek New York's AI Bootcamp learned all about how different legal technologies can be practically be applied. Alongside Arruda, Heller and Crews, the main panel also featured Ryan McClead, vice president of client engagement and strategy at Neota Logic, and Noah Waisberg, co-founder and CEO of Kira Systems, with ALM Intelligence's Patrick Fuller moderating.

Waisberg noted that AI in law already sees widespread adoption in some areas, notably in e-discovery and contract analysis. Other areas, such as litigation, are seeing increased adoption, with forward-looking areas such as case prediction and bill prediction on the way.

It might be surprising to see e-discovery and contract analysis on that list for some lawyers, but that's because the technology has become so normalized. McClead noted that artificial intelligence technologies' adoption mimics human behavior.

“Inherent in [AI's] definition is the movement of time, and that means that things fall off what we consider to be artificial intelligence,” he explained. “Right now you think of a self-driving car and that's clearly artificial intelligence, but in a few years, that will simply be what cars do.”

This means that the concept of what it means to be a lawyer, as Crews posited, could very well change naturally. In particular, he pointed to access to justice as a primary area ripe for innovation and well-needed change due to these new technologies.

“We are pricing people out of justice. And that should be absolutely terrifying to all of you,” Crews exclaimed. “The ability to take people to court is what keeps people from shooting at each other. … Now, I can take a case where it previously wouldn't have been cost-effective to do so. That's monumental.”

That ability to revolutionize law, especially for access to justice purposes, was a main theme of the panel overall. McClead displayed Neota Logic's technology that allowed immigration attorneys to connect with detained people at airports. Arruda, meanwhile, announced that ROSS would be releasing its new technology EVA for free.

“If we really care about the access to justice, we should make sure this technology is available to everybody, not just those who can afford it,” Arruda explained.

To that end, Heller told the story of Marc Dann, a former Ohio state attorney general and a current small firm attorney working primarily with plaintiffs. Previously not a user of legal technology, he's found that using these sorts of technologies have allowed him to close the gap with the Am Law 100 firms.

“As he's gone to fight against harder and harder issues, the buildings on the opposition side get taller and taller. And the attorneys on the other side begin to pile up … without artificial intelligence technology, it would not be an even playing field,” Heller said.

But while technology is an important piece, it's not the only piece. Those tools need to actually solve a problem that needs solving, after all. The panel discussed an AI tool that can beat humans at the complex game “Go,” but Crews noted, even an eight-year-old could beat that AI at checkers since that's not what it's designed to do. He also said he's spoken with talented coders that have awesome tools, but that don't solve a specific problem. “Figuring what tools correspond to what problems, that's where you come in,” Crews said. “That's where humans will be so important.”

Ultimately, when adding technology and human attorneys, the panel said it's a case where 1 + 1 = 3. Arruda noted that when it comes to chess, a human using a computer will never lose to a computer or a human acting alone.

“The way that people have to start thinking about it, we're not out to build robot lawyers, we're out to make robot lawyers less robotic,” Arruda said, explaining that what AI tools do today is eliminate the repetitive tasks that aren't really the practice of law.

Crews agreed, drawing his own analogy to the panic surrounding banking when ATMs were introduced. “Tellers counting cash is a zero margin business. But tellers selling credit cards and talking with people is a high margin business. So what happened is, the tellers moved up to a high-value business … this is what technology does. It's not going to replace you, it's going to help you. You'll be like the bionic lawyer, it will be amazing.”