Thailand's digital revolution, embedded in the Kingdom's national strategy to become a more developed country, is driving the enthusiastic adoption of artificial intelligence.
The introduction of AI to the central functions of businesses is becoming the norm, including in legal departments. Legal teams that embrace AI are increasing their value contribution to the business, for example, by speeding up contract review, automating legal research and using predictive analytics to assess litigation risk. With AI, they are expediting speed to revenue and helping the organisation get ahead of the competition.
Some lawyers have concerns that increased automation lessens their control of legal outputs and quality. Others simply feel uncomfortable with change and would prefer to continue "doing what we've always done". But in reality, AI within a legal team frees lawyers from the mundane, repetitive, low-grade work, which is done so much better (faster and more efficiently) by AI, giving them more time to focus on the more interesting and stimulating aspects of their role.
AI will enhance the work of humans -- in just the way that email aided and did not replace human contact, despite fears when it first arrived in the workplace. The best returns from investment come when humans and AI work synchronously, each playing to their strengths. When automating legal workflows, the aim should be to program the tech to replicate the unique and particular way a given legal team approaches its handling of legal matters.
JUDGEMENT CALLS
However, it is the lawyers who need to take on the important role of making the judgement calls, assessing, checking and interpreting AI outputs, and applying their years of real-world, commercial experience.
The best results come when the AI is trained to be more human-like, and the humans to be more computer-like. It's the intelligent interaction of humans and tech that delivers best results from AI investment.
Take contract review for example: an AI tool can be trained on a legal department's own policies for red-lining points that may be at odds. The lawyers can then pick up the task from this point, focusing their attention on the parts of the contract that need their expert input.
AI is better suited to make this first pass: an experienced lawyer who has been in practice for 15 years or so will have seen thousands of contracts, and can draw on all this experience on a contract review -- but they will have seen far less variation than AI, trained to learn from a far wider pool.
At the same time, AI has limitations, and understanding this is just as important as recognising its potential. Lawyers working with and alongside technology need to know its limits, to judge where their own input is required.
In contract review, there are two important metrics to gauge the effectiveness of AI: first "recall", i.e. did the AI find the specific contract clauses you were looking for?, and second "precision", i.e. did it find only those relevant clauses, or give you a lot of "noise" as well?
Most AI contract review software currently favours "recall" over "precision", which means that sometimes the key issues can be buried in too much information. An expert human eye is vital here, sifting and interpreting outputs.
Non-users of AI can have wild expectations that AI can do everything without the need for human involvement, but that is not the case. AI won't get you from A to Z unaided, but it can get you from A to J, providing a better starting point for the lawyers.
HOLISTIC VIEW
The human element also brings a holistic view of what is in the documents. Multiple sections of a contract may interact, and when read together create a different potential outcome, altering the opportunity-and-risk dynamic. AI may not join the dots in the same way humans can. Human input is needed to make these connections.
Legal professionals are moving forward working in new ways. The good news is that the repetitive, low-grade work -- the work they likely didn't aspire to as they made their way through law school -- AI is best placed to take over, leaving the more interesting and stimulating work for the humans.
Moreover, pre-AI, technology to automate legal processes was often foisted on legal departments by their colleagues in procurement or sales. The advent of AI in legal gives control back to the lawyers, to use the technology in the way they think best.
By taking work off their plate, AI is helping to create more time to focus on the more sophisticated and interesting legal tasks, making their jobs altogether more fulfilling. Not to mention the fact they can be proud of their part in supporting a key aim of the National Strategy: improving Thailand's competitiveness by promoting technology and innovation adoption.
Beth Anderson is the senior director of contract solutions at Epiq, a worldwide provider of legal and business services to law firms, corporations, financial institutions and government agencies.