We live in an era where technology is the way of life. Everything we do has something to do with technology. The phones that we use, the computers that we work on, the websites that we browse, or the transactions that we make online, are all intertwined with each other by technology only. Technology is the only factor that binds all these aspects together. But when it's about the legal industry, it has been said time and again that it is not very tech-savvy and is slow to adapt to the change.

For countries, legal is one of the oldest industries thriving. Since the beginning of the 20th Century civilization, the law is the only aspect that has kept the things together. If there is no law, there would be anarchy and war. Hence, we understand how important it is to uphold law and order in society. But since the legal domain is very old, it has been seen that it is very slow to adapt to the changes which are happening in the technological arena. Law is full of people who like the things to take place in a conventional method and hence because of that, the penetration of the technology in this sector becomes a difficult task.

There are various areas in the legal domain where technology has been successful and the benefits of such changes are being felt by the clients, customers, authorities, and lawyers. The benefits are discussed below here one by one.

Ease of Access: Ever since the technology has penetrated the legal industry, one thing has surely taken place, i.e. ease of access. Now people can file complaints online, see the status of any existing application online, and see the listing of the cases at a particular case online. It was never that easy before the advent of tech in this sector.

Uniformity: The arrival of tech in the legal industry has given us the gift of uniformity of procedure that one can see throughout the state. If filing an FIR in one county is in a particular way, the legal-tech makes sure that the same way is adopted to file FIRs in the other counties of the state. The spreads uniformity in the system and eliminates the need to learn different procedures for different geographies.

Automation: While every aspect of the legal arena that shifts to the online mode, there will be huge automation which could be brought to the industry. There are people all around the world who run away from the possibility of a legal battle because they think that it's too tedious for them, but since the pandemic has taken place, there are people, legal processes such as pleadings, submissions, and discoveries are being done online and this has implied great automation. Also, clients now find it easy to take part in a legal battle because it can be done while sitting at the comfort of their homes with the help of video conferencing.

While there are so many things technology has helped the legal fraternity achieve so far, there are also so many things that may be improved by adopting the latest tech trends in the market. This is where the role of Absolaw starts. Absolaw is a law startup that deals with the services where there is a strong nexus between law and tech. Services such as MDR and eDiscovery are some of the things that we do. There are so many things with which Absolaw helps its clients with the help of Legal-Tech.

ML Reviews: Absolaw provides cutting edge solutions for the document review needs of their clients. We have the resources with which we can cull down data and remove unnecessary non-responsive documents with the help of the ML Review tools. We are experts in using Machine Learning features on platforms such as Relativity, NexLP, Brainspace, etc. which help us in culling down redundancy and only perform a manual review on the important documents as flagged by the system.

AI-ML Clause Management: Absolaw helps in better Contract Management with the help of great AI ML tools such as Kira. The technology used in such CLM platforms gives us the ease of identifying the important clauses in the contracts and also bringing out the best risk management capabilities from the entire corpus.

Innovation: Absolaw helps their clients with outstanding paralegal needs and helps them to get rid of expensive non-legal tasks from their workflow. We assist our clients with the best in class paralegal services and help them in keeping the costs to a minimum. This eliminates the need to hire more people for such non-legal tasks and ultimately helps in expediting the whole procedure with innovation.

It is pretty clear how we can bring a great change to the legal industry by adapting the various concepts of legal-tech. Innovating from time to time and adopting various trends in the market is also a way lawyers may ensure the longevity of their business and getting their foot in the door with some new clients. It is a well-established principle that the better technology we have, the better equipped we are to take of future challenges.

To get to know more about Absolaw's services or to get a quote, click here.

As its widely known that Litigation Document Review takes up to around 60-75% of the cost of modern litigation. That makes us understand how important a precise DR is. But one thing that also comes with all the expenses is that DR is a time-consuming and a pain-staking process. To review a chunk of, let's say, 10,000 documents, it could easily take a team of 10 reviewers 4 to 6 weeks, taking into account the complexity of the documents, of course. This is where AI comes in.

Artificial Intelligence or AI, a product of science and logic, is an up and coming tool in the market, which helps people in doing things faster in many spheres of life. AI is helping Cyber Security, Medical / Life Sciences, Market Research, Accountancy, and of course Legal Services. There have been many tools in the market, which already had a big name in the market owing to their functionality and diverse features for DR are now trying to integrate AI in their workflow, with only one hope of cutting short the time and cost which a typical document review assignment yields.

Many people are still new to the concept of AI and are still under the impression that the integration of AI in DR is a concept in its nascent stage. Many organizations are working day and night to make this happen, such as Microsoft, Relativity, NexLP, Brainspace, etc. Artificial Intelligence combined with Machine Learning gives such results to the teams which help in reducing the time taken in reviewing all the documents.

AI integrated with DR works by making the machine learn on how the documents are to be coded as per the project protocol. There has to be a small number of documents coded in positive or negative binary values. For eg., a document could be either Responsive or Non-Responsive based on the protocol provided by the client. A set of such documents is given to the machine and the machine then looks for the subject-matter values in the documents which compelled the reviewers to make a particular choice for a particular document. The machine then returns the remaining documents in the set of Responsive to Non-Responsive arranged in the order of a Predictive Rank. The higher the predictive rank, the more chances a document has, to be coded as Responsive.

This helps the review teams in culling down the time taken in going through all the documents. With the documents now arranged in the order of their predictive responsiveness, they may now directly QC the documents and code them accordingly.

This method of indexing works on various types of documents such as invoices, email, purchase orders, policies, etc. Since processing and reviewing such documents currently is very time-consuming and prone to errors, AI is paving the way for a faster and more efficient Document Review. A study conducted by EY with Microsoft with such machine learning models has yielded surprising results by concluding the review 200 times faster than the current rate of review and the assessments made by the reviewers 10% more accurate than when humans were involved. 

Organizations such as Microsoft with their Azure, Relativity with their Active Learning, and Brainspace with their CMML tools are trying to pave the way for human beings to conduct review faster than ever. Its time the world should shift towards Document Intelligence from Document Review.

It's safe to say that AI is paving the way for a better DR while the future is bright with all the document intelligence and AI tools, getting economical to use by the DR community. The legal fraternity would also be better off by saving some of their costs incurred in processing and DR.