In today’s corporate America, lawyers are a necessity. Corporations spend billions of dollars a year on legal expenses. In 2013, Bank of America alone spent $6B on legal fees.
Yet advances in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning in recent years are beginning to disrupt this huge market. One example is Ross, a robotic attorney powered by IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence to perform legal research. Ross was “hired” by 10 companies in the past year to help prepare legal cases. It understands questions in plain English and provides specific analytic answers. Another example of these early robot-lawyers is the DoNotPay chatbot. Created by a 19-year-old and currently operating in the UK and US, DoNotPay helped overturn $4m in ticket fines since 2014 by appealing parking tickets with an AI-powered chat.
These examples demonstrate what is becoming possible in the legal field, and how technology is contributing to make a dramatic change in the law profession. With computer’s abilities to replace humans by performing their tasks better, faster and more efficiently, robot lawyers are soon to displace human lawyers. We are predicting a lawyer-less future for humanity.
We are happy to introduce Grisham™, the Robo-Lawyer of tomorrow. Grisham™ is a cloud-based robot that learns from millions of historical rulings, precedents, natural language processing of court decisions, and the legal code itself. This AI will be enhanced through an organization-specific learning that will train Grisham™ on the organization interests, financial limitation, and more.
Grisham™’s main functions will range from (1) “simple” legal tasks, such as research, and getting relevant paperwork based on inputs to support legal support, through (2) answering legal questions to clients and new associates through a robo-chat that will predict the questions and generate answers. This capability will be similar to Amazon Connect that was launched in March 2017 (see reference below). Moreover, (3) Grisham™ will function as a fully autonomous corporate attorney by learning the company’s interests and negotiating on its behalf with other human/robot lawyers. Finally, (4) Grisham will prepare lawyers to trail by playing the opposing lawyer and finding the pitfalls in the case. This function will allow the human lawyer to prepare better to trail and will in parallel train Grisham™ to become a fully functional lawyer.
The effectiveness of Grisham™ is huge. In 2016 the demand for corporate and real estate lawyers grow by 2.5% and 4% respectively, while lawyers declined in their productivity (also affected by overall demand growth and lawyer growth). Looking at the largest law firms in the US by revenues we can also evaluate the potential market size Grisham™ is facing. Latham & Watkins revenues in 2016 were $2.65B with profit margins of 50%. Grisham™ be able to provide at least 50% of tical law firm services for a fraction of a price. This signals on a high commercial promise. The Report on the state of the legal market 2016 also indicates that the hourly rate for lawyer has grown from ~$350 in 2005 to ~$500 in 2015, a 33% increase. This means that Grisham™ will also help to reduce costs in the legal system. Nevertheless, the anticipated competition is high. As of today Ross by IBM already serves a significant number of customers.
Yet the functions described above are only the beginning. In the future, Grisham™ will be able to entirely replace human lawyers. With Grisham’s advanced legal capabilities, human lawyers will no longer be needed. Every citizen will have access to Grisham™ and it will represent every person in court. Courts will no longer be run by human judges. Powerful government-held computers will act as intermediaries, assessing the evidence and arguments from both sides’ lawyers to make a ruling in the case.
One interesting aspect of this system is its positive social implications. Grisham™ would not only make good legal representation affordable and obtainable by all citizens, it would also make the entire system fair and unbiased.
The legal system of the future is just around the corner. Grisham is coming.
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