Quantitative Legal Prediction and Data Driven Law Practice

by Donna Seyle

How often is a lawyer required to make a prediction:  Do I have a case?  What is our likely exposure?  How much is this going to cost? Are these documents relevant?

Even the pros and cons of the use of legal technology in the delivery of legal services, these predictions are held sacred in the court of human function, the “bespoke” end of the legal services spectrum presented by Richard Susskind in his revolutionary book, The End of Lawyers? But in this era of “big data” and soft artificial intelligence, it appears legal prediction may be sacred no longer.

Developers are, as we speak, designing AI models for service industries other than those based on numbers, primarily, the healthcare industry. It is said they started there because there is more money to be made.

But every industry needs to prepare for the overtake of software. The judgment of financial institutions is being executed by software models; 50% of stock trading is being done by software; the driverless car, barely able to go a few hundred yards in 2004, is now able to drive 200,000 miles. In each of these industries, human reasoning had once reigned supreme. But no more. As Professor Dan Katz states in his presentation at Stanford-Codex Program on Legal Informatics, “This is an “is” conversation, not an “ought.”

Professor Katz explains the circumstances creating this environment include the monumental increase of “big data”, the vast decrease in data storage costs, and advancements in computing power and learning.  As GCs and legal consumers act to drive down costs, demanding value propositions and reduction of legal spend; as access to justice challenges balloon out of control, the use of predictive models in legal analysis has fertile ground on which to develop and grow. As access to large bodies of semi-structured legal information grows, the most disruptive of all possible displacing technologies – quantitative legal prediction –  is likely to drive a substantial amount of the future innovation in the legal services industry.

Software investor, visionary and multi-millionaire Marc Andresseen has said:

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs (emphasis added).

 

Basically, it would be foolish to believe that law will somehow escape the way of all business. The legal profession is set to march well past 2.0 tools that enable lawyers to perform efficiently and offer a variety of legal service delivery models. Currently, such tools have displaced between 20-30% of the legal work load, and 30% of lawyers are susceptible to replacement by automation. Those numbers will continue to rise as aspects of predictive coding (such as in the area of e-discovery) begin to take hold.

Will these prediction models have limits? Only to the extent they rely on the limits of human creativity and analysis in enabling them to mimic the behavior of “expert reasoners”: what does it mean to “think like a lawyer?” While humans are amazing in their abilities to detect patterns, aggregation is a problem: how much data can they consider? Machines have no such restrictions. They are not limited by the failings of memory loss, subjective perspectives, or narrow vision. They can proceed to perform high-level pattern detection, high dimensional similarity matching and analogical reasoning to produce predictions that will be reliable, at a fraction of the cost and time.

There is a way forward. Professor Katz and his co-director, Renee Newman Knake created ReinventLaw Laboratory, a law lab devoted to innovation, law and technology, to help chart the course. ReinventLaw identifies four pillars of innovation for the legal services industry: {Law+Tech+Design+Delivery}, and is sponsoring a series of world-wide conferences to discuss the adoption of a new vision for the profession. The first two were in London and Dubai, and hugely successful.

Now it’s our turn, and soon. ReinvenLawSiliconValley will present its 3rd  free conference March 8, 2013 in Mountain View, CA. If your future is in law, attending this conference will help you develop a vision of what lies ahead.