The message at the "Impact of Advanced Legal Research Tools" panel at the International Legal Technology Association's ILTACON 2019 conference couldn't be clearer: The emergence of artificial intelligence-powered legal research tools has fundamentally altered the practice of law. But while today's research platforms have far-reaching repercussions, each is limited in how much it can help supplement an attorney's knowledge.

Scott Reents, lead attorney for data analytics and e-discovery at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, noted that, with the emergence of modern research tools, "We are sort of in transition from a world where law is about reading text and qualitative judgments and anecdotal experiences … to a world where much of that, not all of it, is going to be about data, quantitative analysis [and] statistics."

A lot of what's driving this transition is client demand. "What we are being asked to provide as a lawyer today is different than what I was asked 19 years ago," said Meredith Williams-Range, chief knowledge officer at Shearman & Sterling.

She explained, "Today our lawyers are being asked for not only legal advice in a reactionary mode but also proactive risk analysis. So where these tools really now come together, and play a role in this, is where our lawyers can use them to do risk analysis."

And that's crucial, she added, "Because if we don't, someone else will. And the people coming after us the fastest are the Big 4."

Williams-Range noted that, to empower the firm's attorneys with modern research tools and data, Shearman originally launched an initiative called "data-driven counsel," which allowed each practice area to procure the research tools they wanted. But the firm soon realized these tools were not being used as widely as they should be, especially given how many had cross-practice appeal.  "We know there is no tool for litigation that can't benefit transactions," Williams-Range said.

So the firm took it upon itself to raise awareness. "We promoted them, and we suddenly became the number one user of [the Bloomberg Law research platform] in a month," she noted.

Still, while each research platform has crossover appeal, each also has particular strengths and limitations. Williams-Range said that Westlaw Edge, for instance, is "one of the best on the market" for U.S. law and litigation analytics, and is one of the tools most used by the firm's litigation team. However, she said it's limited in what it can offer in the way of transaction analytics.

On the other hand, she said that Bloomberg Law, while newer than the others, is one platform that is "coming up in the market on the transactional side," a space that has grown over the past few years.

Meanwhile, she said LexisNexis is most useful for due diligence and negative news searches, though it also good for U.S. and French law. Lastly, she highlighted Wolters Kluwer's research platform, which she said is mainly useful for taxation and regulatory issues.

To be sure, while many of these tools are used to perform proactive risk analysis, they cannot be used for predictions. "You'll hear litigation analytics described as predictive analytics. … They don't do that, they don't predict the future," Cravath's Reents said.

Instead, he noted such tools are best leveraged in making educated determinations around things like litigation strategy and case budgets.

What's more, though modern legal research platforms leverage AI, many require humans to support the machine-powered analytics by manually curating knowledge. But Cliff Nichols, senior counsel at Day Pitney, noted that this may be changing with newer legal research players like Casetext and ROSS, whose legal search platforms use AI to exclusively read and classify data.

"It's actually reading the contents of the decision and classifying the decision based on their content rather than what a human did before," he explained.

How that will change the legal research space is anyone's guess, but one thing is certain: The practice of law isn't going back to the way it used to be anytime soon.