Over the last 20 years, the legal profession and its business has moved across the IT space in blending the practice with extant ICT compliance. This further propelled the profession to engage with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which has made law practice better sustained, productive and more efficient.
The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined by John McCarthy and is defined as the development and use of machines to execute tasks which usually require human intelligence.
What does AI bring to the Table of Law Practice?.
AI can and has helped the law business to be more client-centric, data driven and tech-enabled. Various types of AI have been used to carry out various tasks in the legal-sphere to simplify the work of a legal practitioner.
Examples of known deployed AI’s include:
It has been argued that one of the problems of artificial intelligence in Nigeria is public acceptance because it may be hard for lawyers and clients to trust the opinion of the computer. This is, however not true as it has been shown that various law firms world over have begun implementing the use of AI. In fact, Leading Law firms and lawyers in Nigeria and other jurisdictions practicing smartly are becoming aware everyday that Artificial Intelligence is making its mark in all areas of law, be it corporate, litigation or arbitration. Legal Practitioners perform multiple legal tasks, including drafting of contracts, court processes and other documents which would ordinarily take so much working hours. With AI, such monotonous tasks can be performed more quickly, as it helps to extract relevant data, manage documents and use them to prepare necessary documents in a shorter time thereby reducing the amount spent on manpower and giving room for lawyers to focus on other areas where AI may have limited functions.
Legal due diligence is an important function in law practice that requires a lawyer to pay attention to details and think creatively in order to carry out client’s instruction diligently. Conducting due diligence can however be burdensome as it requires a lot of attention and time. Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence simplifies the tedious task associated with legal due diligence as it allows for more accurate risk assessment on due diligence cases by exposing the long term implications of short term decisions as it compares recent decisions with similar precedence.
By doing so, it also helps to assess the risk of non-compliance with regulations. An example of this is the work of the AI named Kira made by KiraSystems which automatically extracts and summarizes any provision of virtually any contract and uncovers insights in them very fast.
AI provides the best means of securing legal information as it has the ability to store large volumes of legal documents for years using Legalpedia which can be accessed by lawyers at any time compared to the human memory that may not keep exact record of information without losing some details with time.Legal research which is an important aspect of law practice has been simplified by Artificial Intelligence which through automated searches and computer search engine can go through over a million pages of legal documents in a split second, finding exact pages, principles and cases needed for the preparation and completion of legal task. Examples are LawPavillion and Ross Intelligence. There is no doubt that the research abilities and functions of AI can save lawyers from the mundane task of reading through plethora of books in search of a piece of information that might just be hidden within the lines of a paragraph and allow them do more in the same amount of time, thereby enabling them to broaden rather than narrow their areas of specialization.
Furthermore, AI can be used to predict the outcome of cases based on precedence of similar cases which is a welcome invention and very useful to Nigeria legal practice as the legal profession thrives on winning cases for its clients. The use of AI requires a lot of funds which if not made available can affect its use and existence. However, it is important to note that when law firms and lawyers consider the profit they stand to gain from the use of AI in carrying out their practice, funding becomes an investment they are willing to make.
With the numerous advantages AI brings, it is settled that AI plays a pivotal role in innovating legal services, ensuring the future competitiveness of the sector and the long-term sustainability of legal practice in Nigeria and is capable of creating the highest level of accuracy and efficiency in Nigeria legal practice. As such, it is important for lawyers and others in the legal profession who are not well skilled in using AI facilities to be encouraged to acquire the required skills in order to achieve and promote a better legal practice in Nigeria.
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