A Law Firm and Generative AI

Legal direction make sense, if the results are good.   Note uses ChatGPT.\ model. 

Hello, Harvey: This Elite Biglaw Firm Is The First To Partner With 'Game-Changing' AI Chatbot

This firm is giving the robots the chance to come for lawyers' jobs -- and do them better.

By STACI ZARETSKY    in Abovethelaw  on February 17, 2023 at 4:16 PM

Robot using a futuristic interface.  This announcement marks a new era for A&O and the legal industry. Harvey AI is not just another platform, but a game-changer that will enable us to deliver unprecedented value, efficiency and innovation to our clients. We are proud to be the first law firm to partner with Harvey AI. We share their vision of using technology to enhance and transform legal services.

— Wim Dejonghe, a senior partner at Allen & Overy, in a statement concerning the Biglaw firm’s integration of Harvey, an innovative AI platform that uses the same model as ChatGPT, but has been enhanced for legal work. Harvey operates in “multiple languages” and can automate legal work with “unmatched efficiency, quality and intelligence.” According to a press release from A&O, “Whilst the output needs careful review by an A&O lawyer, Harvey can help generate insights, recommendations and predictions based on large volumes of data, enabling lawyers to deliver faster, smarter and more cost-effective solutions to their clients.”   ... ' 

Following Legal Analytics: Contracts and Liabilities

Our recent looks at eDiscovery and related AI and analytics alerted us to this.  Accenture's connection would seem to indicate seriousness of these efforts.  It is a very obvious space for advanced natural language processing, analysis and cross referencing with current and future contexts.

Legal analytics: Accenture applies NLP to analyze contracts and liabilities

To find specific information in a million-plus contracts, the global professional services company turned to natural language processing and AI, launching a legal analytics hub in the process.
     
By Thor Olavsrud in CIO

Organizations steeped in text documents have an ally in their quest to streamline business processes. Natural language processing, a branch of AI focused on communication, is helping companies such as Accenture surface high-value information and cut costs by bringing text-based, unstructured communications into the machine learning age.  

With more than a million contracts in its records system and thousands more added monthly, Accenture’s legal organization of about 2,800 professionals was struggling to find specific information across contracts, thanks to a tedious, costly process for which detailed cross-document search capability was limited.   ... " 

AI and Legal Discovery

More developments for the textually and logic intense world of Law.  How much of legal tasks be replaced by systems? Following this.

Everlaw announces $62M Series C to continue modernizing legal discovery   By Ron Miller@ron_miller in TechCrunch

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment.

CapitalG  (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and K9 Ventures also participated. The startup has now raised $96 million, according to the company.

Everlaw  co-founder and CEO AJ Shankar says eDiscovery, which has been around for years, has become a classic big data problem. “We help legal professionals sift through huge volumes of evidence in lawsuits and investigations to find the smoking gun and the incriminating email,” Shankar told TechCrunch.

The software also helps teams of legal professionals work together and collaborate around this evidence. “Turns out that the law is incredibly collaborative, and we help these teams create a work product, and communicate and collaborate with each other in a system specifically built for the practice of law,” he explained.

He says this coordination is often done manually in spreadsheets with communication taking place via email, and even companies using legacy eDiscovery software are using systems designed in a time of lower data volumes.

The company offers a variety of tools to help humans locate the information they need to build a case. There is a search feature, of course, and data visualization tools including a timeline tool that helps pinpoint when key events happened. This can help lawyers direct researchers to find evidence within that critical period, greatly narrowing the focus of the search.

And the company also offers both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to help the team find specific bits of information. He acknowledges it will take human ingenuity working with the tool to find what you need. “No one’s handing you anything on a silver platter. It absolutely requires some detective work. It’s iterative and we have tools to help you with that,” he said.

Shankar stumbled into this area of technology when he was still a graduate student in computer science and a law firm came to his department looking for a technical expert. He ended up working with the firm for a couple of years, saw the kinds of technical challenges it faced, and decided to build some tooling to help..... "

Harvard Caselaw Access Project

Taking  a deeper dive into the details of this, and notably who is looking at related predictive analytics that might be applied.

Project: Caselaw Access Project

Where can I find Caselaw Access Project?

What does Caselaw Access Project do?

The Caselaw Access Project is making all U.S. case law freely accessible online.

Why does Caselaw Access Project exist?
Our common law - the written decisions issued by our state and federal courts - is not freely accessible online. This lack of access harms justice and equality and stifles innovation in legal services.

The Harvard Law School Library has one of the world's largest, most comprehensive collections of court decisions in print form. Our collection totals over 42,000 volumes and roughly 40 million pages. Caselaw Access Project aims to transform the official print versions of these court decisions into digital files made freely accessible online. ...

They are working with Ravel:    https://www.ravellaw.com/  Note examples of the use of legal analytics. 

Detailed Description of work:  http://etseq.law.harvard.edu/2015/10/free-the-law-overview/