Can Robots Replace Lawyers? This Indian AI Startup Is Making A Case For Legal Tech

Source:- forbes.com

In India, many law firms may not be familiar with the impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work…but that could change soon. Aniruddha Yadav, founder of the law-tech startup CaseMine, describes the legal industry as ripe for disruption in India — although a robot isn’t about to replace lawyers altogether anytime soon.

To change the tradition-bound and labor-heavy legal profession, Yadav developed a virtual legal research assistant, CaseIQ, to automate mundane tasks that are largely the responsibility of flesh-and-blood lawyers.

“CaseIQ reduces research time from anywhere between 5% to 50% of what is needed on legacy system. A research project lasting a couple of weeks can be condensed into several hours,” says Yadav.

“Oftentimes, senior lawyers get stumped by ‘on point cases’ they never knew of but [were] retrieved by CaseIQ. This extra body of knowledge is often the difference between winning and losing a case,” he adds.

Not a trained lawyer, Yadav, who has an engineering degree and a PhD in Theoretical Physics, says his affinity for using a quantitative approach to address real-world problems prompted him to start CaseMine in 2014.

Describing his light-bulb moment, Yadav says, “During one of my vacations in India, while I was doing [a] postdoctoral fellowship in New York, I had a conversation about our ailing legal system with my uncle, which got me thinking about how data science can be leveraged to make legal research less time consuming and more efficient.”

To design CaseIQ, Yadav used neurolinguistic programming, text analytics techniques and network analysis. CaseMine’s AI, a SaaS offering, includes data visualization, collaboration, archiving and drafting tools. It guides lawyers through different types of work, while connecting them to relevant templates, documents and precedents at the right moments.

“Judges can upload both the appellant’s counsel’s submission and the respondent’s counsel’s submission directly into CaseIQ and within seconds see whether both parties are missing out on important precedents and lines of thought that are important to the case, thus enabling the judge to quickly take into account the whole body of applicable law before ruling,” says Yadav. It also reduces significantly the time for drafting a document, he adds.

However, its traditional aversion to risk has meant the legal profession has not been in the vanguard of new technology.

Many are skeptical at first, Yadav says.

“We have do a lot of educating to dispel incorrect preconceived notions about AI,” says Yadav. “Typically, mostly senior lawyers and law school professors have a view that AI will not allow their associates and students to hone their research skills. We have to promptly remind them that harnessing AI to research is the new kind of skill set that needs honing, and it will make young lawyers and law students learn faster and become more productive and efficient.”

Understanding the emerging technology

Meanwhile, recognizing that a failure to invest in technology will hinder one’s ability to compete in today’s legal market, few law firms are undertaking initiatives to understand the emerging technology, and adapt to it. In January, Mumbai-based Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas adopted Canada-based machine learning legal system Kira, which has striking efficiency gains.

As the digitization of court records in India advances — the Supreme Court digitized a whopping 10 million pages and records of civil appeals this year — it is expected AI will be adopted by more law firms. “The full gamut of AI’s capabilities are best utilized when digitized documents are available,” Yadav says.

CaseMine already has several hundred paying customers as well, Yadav says. “We have senior lawyers and many law firms on board.”

One of the few successful entrepreneurs who bootstrapped their startups from nothing, Yadav is now on an expansion mode. “We plan to launch our product in the U.S. and U.K, soon, while we technically grow our AI technology.”

Although AI has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, other lawyers’ tasks, such as advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court seem beyond the reach of computerization.

“AI will not replace lawyers but augment their abilities. It makes them more productive, efficient and aware about their domain of expertise,” says Yadav. The clever software is changing how decisions are made, as it simultaneously changes the profession.