At ILTA, IBM Posits AI Is Necessity for Future Business of Law

IBM Watson Legal leaders put AI into context and discussed how it is being used in the legal industry.

"Artificial intelligence is exciting, but much confusion remains about what it actually is and is not. In the case of law, this misunderstanding is exacerbated by hyperbolic headlines suggesting the end of lawyers. This, says IBM Watson Legal global leader Brian Kuhn, isn't really helping anybody.

Kuhn and Shawnna Hoffman, global cognitive legal co-leader at IBM, delivered the Tuesday keynote at the International Legal Technology Association's 2017 ILTACON conference. In their session, the two discussed how AI actually works in the business of law, and estimated that AI will likely become the norm sooner than we think.

Hoffman said to consider that "88 percent of data is invisible to us." This is because society is producing mass amounts of unstructured data, and those amounts are increasing at unprecedented rates. In the past two years, for instance, more information was created than had previously been for all of time. In 10 years, the amount of data in existence will double every 12 hours..."

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