The Future of Legal Technology

Kent Radford

Why It Matters

ABA Model Rule 1.1 Competence

A lawyer shall provide competent representation to a client. Competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.

Comment [8]  To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.

Why It Matters, cont.

• “The tools lawyers use to conduct research, review documents, assemble documents, communicate with clients and invoice and accept payment are inefficient.”

• “We do everything online, there’s no reason to think law will be the exception.”

-- Forbes 8/12/2014

The Future

• Finding law

• Finding legal advice

• Drafting legal documents

• Predicting legal outcomes

• Finding evidence

• Learning law

• Making law

• Deciding/resolving disputes

• Compliance and enforcement

• Deepening the rule of law

Drafting Legal DocumentsLegalZoom

• Founded in 2001 in California with a major office in Austin

• Provides forms for people to fill out

• Offers a subscription model for people seeking legal advice

• Over 1,000,000 users in 2011

• Received $266M in funding (7/24/11-1/7/2014)

Drafting Legal Documents

LegalZoom, cont.

Sample Texas Directive To Physicians and Family or Surrogates of Jane Doe

“In fact, several lawyers … said they love LegalZoom because they get paid for untangling all the mistakes people make using online DIY legal forms.” National Review 8/1/2014

Predicting Legal Outcomes

Lex Machina

• Spinoff from Stanford’s Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse

• Analytics applied to IP–“money ball”

• $50,000 per year

• What it does• How many times a patent has been asserted and how

many findings of infringement• Which judge will hear your case• Which lawyers do the best against non-practicing

plaintiffs• Which defendants are likely to sue other defendants

Predicting Legal Outcomes

Lex Machina, cont.

• $4.8 million Series A funding round led by Boston-based Cue Ball Capital

• How they do it• Gathered millions of pages of public available

information from 2000 forward for a massive database• Used machine learning and natural language search;

took specific legal terms and turned them into natural language algorithms that classify documents into 10 categories in their system (this is the secret sauce)

• Limitations

Finding Evidence

Technology + Services

Speed

• 1/3 Second Search

• 1/10 Second Document Navigation

• Lawyer Focused Design

• Got Data? 3.5 TB, 20,000,000 Unique Documents, 100,000,000 pages

• Translate from any language to English (Unicode compliant)

Processing

• Uncompress containers

• Remove system files

• Extract text, metadata

• OCR

• Time zone correction

• Duplicate detection

• Image everything upfront

• Families + threads

• Search indexes

• DB + file repository

• Ingest report

• What affects speed?

• Unusual filetypes

• Preprocessed data

Formats

Ingestion

• Natives are always best

• 2nd best: DAT + OPT

• Do not preprocess

• #1 source of problems is bad load files

Production

• EDRM + PDF

• Concordance

• SEC

• Summation

• Natives only

• Exports to review

Roadmap

• Searchable logs and advanced statistics

• Self upload and ingest

• Multi-pass review, review stages

• Inconsistent tagging flags

• Browse

• Suggested tags (internal, across databases, with primary law)

• Spoliation detection

• Alerts using suggested tags against real-time data in place