Law Firm Hires Robotic Lawyer

By now, you’d think that you have seen all the surprises technology but that doesn’t seem the case anymore. Meet ROSS, a new legal robot that has been hired by one of the country’s biggest law firms to handle its bankruptcy cases. ROSS is now marketed as the first artificial intelligent attorney in the world. With just 50 human employees in the bankruptcy section, BakerHosteler felt that adding a legal robot to its ranks was a great idea.

ROSS is an AI machine that’s powered by Watson technology from IBM and is intended to help with any legal research while working for the law firm. This machine will be expected to go through thousands of documents at the firm to bolster the cases handled by the company. These type of tasks that ROSS will be responsible for are the same ones that fresh out law school lawyers are entrusted with early on at the start of their careers.

The decision by BakerHosteler, a firm with 9000 employees, to employ ROSS is a major representation of the win for ROSS Intelligence which has managed to have their software in use by a law firm as big as this one. According to Arruda, the aim is to have ROSS as part of legal teams in law firms across the world.

Over the past few years, there has been a gradual increase in the use of publicly available documents and data mining technology by legal assistance tech companies to create powerful legal bots. For instance, Legal by Lex Machina is software that mines public court documents to determine how a judge will rule in a certain case. CaseText is another start-up that analyzes state and federal case using crowd-sourcing. Everyday people have also resorted to creating bots that help with the legal system. A good example is the DoNotPay bot that was developed by an 18-year old British coder and which handles parking ticket appeals through a Q&A chat as well as helping with payment-protection insurance claims. The bot is available for free and has so far helped drivers save the cost of hiring lawyers for such appeals.

On the question of whether or not human lawyers should worry about their career responsibilities being taken over by robots, BakerHosteler insists that legal robots aren’t a way to replace attorneys. Instead, they are a tool that helps boost productivity by allowing lawyers to move and learn faster. According to Ross Intelligence, this technology allows attorneys to focus on being creative and advocating their clients.

Although the Office of Tom Medrano doesn’t plan on hiring any robots soon it certainly is a remarkable situation.