When the conversation turns to artificial intelligence as it relates to law, the tone is often that of an "other": that AI is coming in as an outsider to the traditional legal process. But Joshua Walker, author of "On Legal AI" and co-founder of CodeX and Lex Machina, doesn't view the two as different in function at all. At the core, "we're fundamentally analyzing classification problems and procedures," Walker said.

So the question becomes, how to integrate AI and legal processes to move the law forward? Walker discussed the potential solutions and more with ALM chief content officer Molly Miller during the "How Futures Affect Daily Practice Dilemmas Today" keynote on the second day of Legalweek(year) 2021. His answer, as it turns out, may be a matter of changing the perception of how lawyers view AI—and how technologists view the role of lawyers.

First, he said, is defining innovation and the problems an organization is trying to solve in a discrete—perhaps even mathematical—way. When deciding whether to make a change, Walker suggested looking at the delta between the old way of doing things and the new, or put another way: "process one times the cost of process one, against process two by the cost of process two," he said.