Nicole Clark is the CEO and co-founder of Trellis Research. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

As one of the last frontiers for big data, legal tech is still in its infancy. AI-powered legal analytics is working its way into every aspect of the legal industry. It has helped litigators sort through thousands of pages of discovery documents. It has also helped litigators gain strategic insights into the way a judge rules or an opposing counsel argues. When combined, the promise of AI-powered legal analytics is undeniable, offering litigators unprecedented tools for the development of case strategies.

High-Tech Legal Research

The State of Texas is widely known as an electronics leader. Since the 1950s, Texas Instruments and other high-tech companies transformed the region into a key technology hub for the United States. It is unsurprising, then, to find legal analytics spread across the state, deployed throughout the offices of large and small law firms.

Legal analytics is not new. Many litigators have used technology to conduct legal research in their day-to-day legal practice for years. This research has relied on electronic databases (think: Westlaw), a research practice that is not dramatically different from the kind of research conducted in law libraries. Things change, however, when these electronic databases align with new forms of artificial intelligence, softwares that can search for and extract data that is similar to a user's inquiry.

Consider, for example, MacKenzie Dunham, an attorney who operates Access Justice Houston, a "low bono" law firm in Texas. Dunham describes a challenging sexual assault case, one that required him to search through multiple sources of case law to locate an authoritative definition of reasonable grounds to believe. After unsuccessfully combing through secondary sources and utilizing conventional search methods, he eventually tried Casetext's Case Analysis Research Assistant (CARA), an AI-powered legal research tool that uses latent semantic analysis to identify patterns in legal documents. In a matter of seconds, CARA provided Dunham with "a U.S. Supreme Court case analyzing what a 'reasonable ground' meant and comparing it to probable cause."

These powerful search platforms enable users to answer legal questions with incredible speed and accuracy. Jeff Price, a Dallas-based attorney with Quilling, Selander, Lownds, Winslett & Moser, reflects on his use of ROSS Intelligence. "I recently worked on a project to determine the best damages model for a trademark infringement case. With the help of ROSS, I quickly found several cases that had analogous fact patterns. It also identified cases that provided additional grounds for the recovery of damages that I hadn't previously considered."

Smarter, Faster Document Production

Legal analytics platforms can do much more than search. They can also build. Across the State of Texas, immigration attorneys have utilized automated technologies and natural language processing to make immigration services more accessible and more affordable. These products deploy "complex conditional logic to help people prepare the paperwork and documents they need for an immigration filing."

To give an example, Berry Appleman & Leiden, a global immigration law firm with offices in Austin and Houston, uses open-source software libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Tesseract OCR. Using its repository of immigration law data, the firm trains AI systems to spot patterns. The firm then uses artificial intelligence "to extract information from documents and draft responses to certain common government requests [they] frequently handle for corporate clients." As one of its managing partners explains, "[w]hen the law firm receives a [government request for evidence], its systems can read the letter, interpret what it is requesting, search a library for potential responses, and then draft a response based on what was said."

Another firm, Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart, partnered with LegalMation, a legal tech company that provides a web-based AI tool that automatically generates litigation documents. An attorney uploads a PDF document into the website, which then translates the PDF into text, analyzes its contents, and generates a relevant draft response. According to the firm's chief knowledge officer, the tool shrinks six to eight hours of work into two minutes, saving the firm time and money. The firm then shares these savings with their clients, charging a fee for the technology while also reducing the number of billable hours charged to the client. This equates to roughly $3,000 in savings per case. It also allows attorneys to be more strategic and less tactical, explains Ron Chapman, Jr., a Dallas-based shareholder at Ogletree.

A New Legal Landscape

Even with all of these advances, the adoption of AI-powered legal analytics has been slow. There are skeptics, with even its proponents acknowledging its limitations. Michael Smith, a patent infringement litigation attorney with Siebman, Forrest, Burg & Smith in Sherman, warns that predictive analytics can never tell you the whole story. Judicial analytics, for example, "many tell you more about the types of cases [in the dataset] than it does the judge's predispositions. I repeatedly have to caution people that their opponent is not the judge's tendencies or prior rulings, but the facts of the case."

These warnings are a reminder that legal tech may be a new, uncharted territory. It is, nevertheless, here. The attorneys who have embraced these new technologies are moving fast, helping them manage every aspect of the litigation process at incredible speeds and with incredible efficiencies.

Nicole Clark is the CEO and co-founder of Trellis Research and a business litigation, labor and employment attorney. Trellis is an AI-powered legal research and analytics platform that gives state court litigators a competitive advantage by making trial court rulings searchable, and providing insights into the patterns and tendencies of your opposing counsel, and your state court judges. Trellis is providing Texas Lawyer readers complimentary 14-day access to its platform. Click here to start your free trial today.