Artificial Intelligence

 

When the Blickstein Group began putting together its newest report earlier this year, it started with one question: How effective are AI-powered legal tech solutions at solving their intended problem? The answer, for about 50 solutions, is set to arrive.

The Blickstein Group will be offering a preview of its Legal AI Efficacy Report at ILTACON this year, analyzing artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled solutions across a number of different use cases. For each solution, the report will feature analysis of the tool, its practical use, a SWOT analysis of its positioning in the legal marketplace, and where AI fits into the tool’s use, among other information.

The tools found within the report break down into eight distinct buckets, though publisher and co-author Brad Blickstein noted that some tools could conceivably serve multiple purposes. The eight categories of tools reviewed are:

  1. E-discovery and document review;
  2. Insight and predictive tools;
  3. Legal research;
  4. Billing and spend management;
  5. Contract management: Pre-execution;
  6. Contract management: Post-execution;
  7. Expertise automation; and
  8. Automation tools.

The report will be fully available for purchase at the website legalaireport.com at the start of ILTACON, and the full report itself will be released on September 23. Once the report is released, it will be updated quarterly with new entrants to the market and substantial product feature upgrades. The price for a year’s subscription to the full report is $4995, which includes initial access and three quarterly updates. ILTA members can receive 20% off for a $3996 final price through October 7.

Blickstein and co-author Erin Harrison (who is also a former Legaltech News editor-in-chief) conducted briefings with senior executives and product managers for each of the tools in the report, sometimes multiple times. Blickstein told Legaltech News that the goal was to ask as many tough questions as possible: “We had our B.S. meters out quite a bit, to not let them get comfortable in telling what they want you to know as opposed to what we’re trying to find out.”

He doesn’t feel that any of the companies they interviewed were particularly tight-lipped about the tools, noting that “once you figure out the direct question to ask them, most of them didn’t dodge that question.” That doesn’t mean, however, that the report is uniformly positive. In fact, one of the report’s preview excerpts says of a tool, “The overall value proposition is unclear as the tool is unlikely to uncover issues that could not otherwise be seen. …While the benefits offered are ‘nice to have,’ from a business perspective, this tool is not a ‘must have.’”

This type of language is by design, Harrison noted. At its core, the report looks to tackle how well AI tools tackle their distinct problems rather than how well the tool itself is built.

“Law firms and legal departments that take the approach of looking at a problem and figuring out the best way to solve it will end up winning,” she said. “Having an AI strategy for the sake of saying you are using AI isn’t going to amount to much. You still need to be strategic when it comes to deploying the technologies that help solve a specific business problem, like legal spend or matter management. An AI-based tool might be the best solution, but maybe it’s not too, and that’s OK.”

To that end, the Blickstein Group assembled a group of 14 experts on an advisory board to help identify those distinct problems. Dera Nevin, a lawyer and legal technologist most recently with Baker McKenzie, is listed as the report’s senior advising editor.

Blickstein said the report is primarily aimed at an audience of in-house and law firm counsel, “people looking to figure out what they can do with AI, or the right way to look at it is, looking to solve problems that they have a hunch an AI-powered tool might be good for.” But with that said, he also sees how it could be “an extremely powerful competitive intelligence tool” for legal technology companies and for venture capitalists looking to invest in the space.

And as for what the analysts learned, Blickstein said that nothing in the report truly surprised him. But he did notice “the extent to which these companies love to tell you that their tool is not designed to take jobs away from lawyers. The conclusion I came to is that they are lying, either to themselves or to you. Because there is no way these tools are not going to take jobs away from lawyers.”

The report’s preview tells the story of Siemens AG president and CEO Joe Kaeser, where Siemens introduced automation to one portion of its assembly plant, didn’t fire any workers, and saw a 1000% increase in productivity. “That doesn’t surprise me, that makes sense,” Blickstein told LTN. “But what are you going to do with a 1000% productivity gain unless you have a 1000% gain in demand? … I don’t think we’re going to see a 1000% gain in demand in the legal space.”

There’s also the point that legal AI, as it stands, is still not a mature market—an opinion echoed by both of the report’s researchers. Harrison laid out three reasons why: “One, lawyers are risk-averse by nature and two, legal is a highly regulated industry—so the technology and results have to be really good for a lawyer to get on board with it. Third, legal AI is advancing but it’s far from being strong enough to replace humans. We are seeing different applications of machine learning and natural language processing augment technologies that have existed for years, but it’s not much more advanced than the AI we are seeing from many startups.”

But there’s something that could jump-start that curve, Blickstein added: thinking about AI in legal as a way to solve distinct problems, rather than an end goal itself. “When someone says ‘what’s our AI strategy,’ it’s like saying, ‘what’s our electricity strategy?’ Electricity doesn’t do anything, it just allows you to do tons of stuff. Once the marketplace understands this better, it will start to grow quite faster.”