ILTACON 2017 – THE EXPECTATIONS ADJUSTMENTS IN TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS FOR THE LEGAL MARKET

During the week between August 13 and August17, the city of Las Vegas held the fortieth edition of ILTACON, in which I had the honor of being the first Brazilian to participate as a “speaker” (after 20 years participating as a listener), where the new collaboration platforms for the legal market were discussed.

The theme “Artificial Intelligence” is still the current buzzword, but, in this edition of ILTACON, the issue was discussed with much more serenity, after the frisson that took place in the previous edition. Not that the issue had lost its importance, but by the fact that the companies have realized that adopting this concept is not the panacea for all the problems, much less the only solution that is going to solve all of them at the same time. Although IBM has presented, in one of the opening sections, the immense capabilities of Watson, the truth is that we are still fairly far away from the capabilities of Hal (for the ones who remember the Kubrick film) or the boy David (Al film).

As I had already written in previous articles, the so-called Artificial Intelligence, or more specifically, Cognitive Intelligence, is nothing more than the set of technological developments that have emerged in recent times and that, together or separately, has helped people in some specific tasks that, until recently, was only possible by the human brain.

We can list the following new techniques (some of them are not so new, but are being continuously improved): facial recognition, voice recognition, natural language recognition (Alexia, Siri and Google Voice Search, still embryonic),transformation of verbal language into text and vice versa, statistical algorithms of simulation and prediction (Regression, Decision Tree, VMS, Naïve Bayers, KNN, Random Forest, etc). and  more specifically for the legal market (which is what interest us) the algorithms of semantic interpretation of texts that enable contextual analysis and the extraction of the subject to which a particular text refers to.

Out of the huge amount of digital information that currently exists, about 88% of them are still inaccessible to interpretation and to the digital addressing (according to an appraisal made  by IBM), as they are information referred to as unstructured, that is, texts, videos and sounds.

The professions referred to as humanities or non-exact, such as Law and Medicine, deal with those pieces of information and the technology to address them was not able to develop with the same speed it was developed when addressing numeric information.

The first programs to address the so-called databases emerged in the mid 60’s and have been highly developed since then and they became more user-friendly (in the past only DBA’s were able to extract information from the databases, currently with the help of the systems such as “Tableau” or “Qlik”, almost any user can do so without a great deal of training.) On the other hand, the search tools per word only came up in the 90’s (Google was a big success back in 1998) and the first search engines for the legal market emerged about one decade ago, however, with no intelligence at all to notice when a user searches for the word “letter” he may also be searching for the word “correspondence”, “memorandum” or “memo”, etc. For this little intelligence to operate, a programmer and a lawyer need to work together and they should create libraries of specific synonyms and should register them in the system, making them, despite being so good, laboriously limited.

Due to this delay or inability of technology (the difference does not matter) to solve these difficulties, the non-exact professions still much depend on the human interpretation of the texts, sounds and videos, making them relatively protected from the technological “attack.” So far!

The real big revolution that has already started still shows its first steps, but it is inevitable; this is what I call as  : the approximation of the words to the numbers”. When the new technologies are able to statistically address the words in the same way they address the numbers and/or when a computer is able to fully understand all the nuances of the human language and interpret it (with affordable costs to everyone), everything will be different. Companies, such as RAVN and KIRA (just examples), have already developed contractual analysis products incorporating those new technologies and making the life of the lawyer much more agile. There is still a long path to be taken, but, surely, the way how some professions are performed, will be radically changed.