Pro Bono News

AI in Legal and Access to Justice

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

AI in Legal and Access to Justice

"This past weekend, experts from around the country gathered in Denver for the American Association for Justice, which seeks to ensure that any person who is injured by misconduct or negligence can obtain justice through the court system.

Among the presenters at the conference was Thomson Reuters own David Curle, Director of Technology and Innovations, and Tonya Custis, Research Director, to talk about the impact of AI in the legal field. We caught up with David to ask him a few questions about the opportunities and challenges facing lawyers in legal tech today and in the future.

Legal Current: AAJ is coming up this weekend. What’s the name of your presentation and what do you plan to cover?

David Curle: The presentation is called “AI in Legal: State of the Art, and the Role of Domain Expertise.” We’ll discuss the many ways artificial intelligence technologies are already having an impact on the legal system. My co-presenter is Tonya Custis, a research director from our R&D department, and she’ll be speaking about the importance of domain expertise in AI development – in other words, she’ll address the fact that you can’t do good AI in a field like legal without involving legal experts. It’s more than just the technology.

Since AAJ consists primarily of plaintiff trial lawyers, naturally they will be very interested in AI applications that litigators are most likely to engage with – such as predictive coding in eDiscovery, or legal research. But part of the aim of the talk is to demonstrate that AI is going to become ubiquitous in the legal system as more and more applications across all types of legal practices are developed.

And beyond that, I want to help the AAJ membership look ahead and recognize the types of situations where they might expect AI technologies to play a role in the future. Legal work across the entire justice system is going to become more data-driven; learning to take advantage of that trend starts with a new mindset about legal work, and the kind of processes and decisions that can be enhanced by the application of AI to legal data sources..."

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