We've all wished for that perfect legal intern: the one who comes for the summer but stays on long after learning how to do the job, plows cheerfully through piles of rote paperwork, finds every error, highlights every possible concern, and earns your trust through flawless performance and tireless work ethic. If you're lucky enough to have worked with such an intern, you know the joy that comes from focusing on the higher-level aspects of your job without worrying about the details.

The good news is that you have a way to permanently bring that intern into your transactional law practice by adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

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Advances in AI Technology

To be clear, AI nowadays is simply the ability of computers and software to perform tasks that historically were viewed as the exclusive territory of human intelligence. AI systems might recognize and even translate language, categorize data and use it to make decisions, or identify different types of objects.

Newer AI systems have given computers shockingly human-like abilities; natural language processing, for example, allows computers to recognize concepts regardless of the specific words used to communicate them. And these increased capabilities have not come at the cost of speed or efficiency. As ever, AI can still crunch through vast quantities of data in a fraction of the time it would take humans to review it.

This has opened the door for a wholesale disruption of legal practice. It's also created a considerable tension between the new world order and our historical approach. For example, the very idea that AI can save lawyers hours or even days of monotonous work conflicts with the traditional billable-hour payment structure employed by most firms. Some in the legal industry fear that they won't be able to keep pace with changes in technology or that AI will mean the end of entry-level jobs.

It won't. Here's why…

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AI Applications in Transactional Law

AI systems are perfectly complementary with transactional law. Contracts, policies, due diligence documents, international regulations, and tax codes can change daily, yet those changes are often miniscule and easily missed. Further, all of these documents are mind-numbingly voluminous.

This is exactly the environment where AI systems flourish. What AI is taking over for lawyers is, so far, mostly rote “search and find” work, assisting rather than replacing humans. AI, like the dream intern, will allow transactional lawyers to “stop doing repetitive, repeatable and mundane legal work.”

For instance, today's AI can analyze contracts, identifying specific obligations, risks, variances, and key dates or quantities or comparing terms for due diligence assessments. JPMorgan has been an early adopter, achieving rapid results with its AI-powered program, “COIN” (short for “COntract INtelligence”), which interprets commercial loan agreements. In literal seconds, COIN can evaluate agreements that would have consumed 360,000 hours of attorney time.

Other types of contract software can help attorneys draft new contracts in a fraction of the time. By analyzing language and learning common legal terms and phrases, AI can check for ambiguities or inconsistencies, flag undefined terms, and highlight variations that need hands-on attorney attention. This is the crux of leveraging AI for maximum results: letting smart technology search for and identify problems so that attorneys can spend their valuable time fixing them rather than finding them.

Having AI handle the nitty-gritty details frees lawyers up to look at the big picture. Computers can't proactively advise or counsel clients so that they can avoid conflicts or problems such as reactionary litigation later, but it can give attorneys time to do so. Indeed, the core of transactional lawyering is the human capacity for “strategy, creativity, judgment, and empathy—and those efforts cannot yet be automated.”

What's more, we're rapidly building a data universe that's too expansive for humans to navigate—meaning we're going to need AI's assistance just to keep up.

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We've Created a World So Complex That We Need AI

Transactional law has always been about lawyers' ability to see both the big picture and the tiny details at once. Mastery of those details gives us the ability to raise our perspective to the altitude we need to offer holistic solutions. Now, though, we've created a system that breeds so much data that it threatens to obscure our view of the forest. Data is growing exponentially with no sign of a slowdown. Everything we do is recorded, sending a relentless stream of data into the seemingly limitless stores of the cloud.

Someone, somewhere, has to evaluate what all of that information means for each company that owns it, as well as how it works with the massive volume of laws and regulations that our global society must abide by.

As executive director, Travis Leon is responsible for driving Litera Microsystems' global new business operations, developing key relationships with clients and contributing to general strategy decisions. Prior to joining Litera Microsystems, Travis co-founded XRef to assist law firms in dealing with competing market pressures by leveraging technology to more efficiently and cost-effectively achieve excellence in legal drafting. Previously, Travis qualified and practiced as a solicitor in the Derivatives and Structured Products Group at Linklaters in London.