The BBC recently published a report suggesting that in the last decade the initial excitement over AI is cooling off. As a result, some researchers have warned that we could be on track for an ‘AI Winter’. But with investment in legal technology hitting the $1billion mark, it seems that - at least in the legal sector - these claims are misplaced. Key to this, is understanding that AI will not make the professional judgement and expertise of advisors obsolete. Rather, legal AI is a highly valuable tool, supercharging lawyers to deliver the best possible results for their clients.

Human at the core

The BBC attributes the ‘feeling of plateau’ as stemming from the lack of development in AGI, or ‘Artificial General Intelligence’. These are machines which would be capable of understanding the world as well as any human could. Nonetheless, this type of AI has no place in the legal world - no machine can replace natural human instinct, years of legal experience or raw emotional intelligence. Just as calculators do not replace mathematicians, legal AI should not replace lawyers.

Luminance: empowering advisors

Luminance’s cutting-edge technology is designed to work as a seamless extension of a lawyer’s review. This is all made possible by Luminance’s core intelligence engine, ‘LITE’ (Legal Inference Transformation Engine), which has the pioneering ability to immediately read and analyse legal documents, in any language and any jurisdiction, by identifying the underlying patterns in the data. This is then organised on an intuitive and easy-to-read interface, allowing advisors to unearth critical risks and organise their review in the most logical way possible.

The tool becomes incrementally more powerful as the advisor interacts with the documents. LITE learns from these interactions to generate new insights tailored to the lawyer’s interests and the data room. This goes far beyond legacy technology solutions, which were limited to answering pre-set queries and questions following intensive pre-training, leading to lawyers relinquishing control to a machine. With Luminance, it is the lawyer steering the review and making the all-important decisions.

Value of AI

In January 2020, adoption of AI in the legal profession has reached an all-time high. In fact, research from Wolters Kluwer found that nearly half of organisations are effectively using technology today. This number is only expected to increase as the legal industry continues to experience real, competitive value from leveraging AI. Clearly, the ‘AI Winter’ is well and truly over for the legal profession.