Technology-Law

The sixth annual Clio Cloud Conference held a talk with lawyers about how artificial intelligence and blockchain-based technologies can be used by firms of various sizes to become more cost and time efficient.

Dat Nguyen, a former Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy attorney who is now vice president of special projects at blockchain startup Sagewise, said blockchain technology can transform how lawyers verify e-signatures.

He noted that e-signatures can be difficult to authenticate because you're only given a receipt that lists an IP address and a date. That isn't secure, specifically in the legal field where contesting the accuracy of an e-signature can be costly, he added.

But using blockchain, Nguyen explained, can provide a hash at the time of signing that “mathematically proves it is unique to that document” and serves as a unique fingerprint. Document tampering and forgery could then become a thing of the past, he added.

In addition to blockchain, Casetext CEO Jake Heller noted that AI can be used in outsourcing low-level cognitive legal functions that can free up lawyers to spend more time on higher cognitive issues. Low-level work, he explained, are the manual processes that clients don't want to pay for and that can be easily automated.

Heller surmised that outsourcing some of that work to AI programs may help to lower law firm prices or provide a better way to predict how much a lawyer will charge. He cited as an example Kira, an AI-powered program that shifts through thousands of contracts for due diligence projects to find clauses that law firms view as potentially dangerous, a task that would take a lawyer much longer to find.

Heller predicted the future of law practice will be faster and more affordable and provide better outcomes for lawyers.

“If you can take certain aspects of your practice that bore you, that clients aren't paying for and that is making your practice more expensive, such as e-discovery, legal research, contract review, and use AI, you can pass [those] savings and predictability on to your clients,” he explained. “That's a big deal for clients.”

He added that since lawyers don't spend time on lower-level tasks, they can do what they are meant to do: high-level legal work. “You bring a unique amount of intelligence and intuition to every single case, that's the part you should be focused on,” he said. “Artificial intelligence allows you to focus more on that.”

A legal trends report presented by Clio found that the mass market of law firms, which are smaller than midsize and Big Law firms, could possibly automate and provide more automated lawyering as a way to reach and bill more clients.