"“You may think we’re here to talk about technology, but we’re really here to talk about money,” panelist Michael Mills declared at the beginning of “How to Hire a Robot—or Using Expert Systems in Today’s Law Firm.”

Some visitors to the Thursday afternoon Techshow panel may also have expected to meet a mechanical marvel. In fact, the session on expert systems discussed how technology and legal expertise can make you money.

Expert systems are a kind of Web-based software that automates tasks an expert might perform. TurboTax is one such system, Mills said; so are Web-based medical applications such as WebMD’s Symptom Checker. In a law firm context, that means automating the expertise of a lawyer so that lots of people can use it without individual consultations."

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