Today, attorneys spend countless hours doing legal research on legal issues presented to them by their clients. Oftentimes, clients are unable or unwilling to pay for the amount of hours it takes attorneys to do adequate research in response to their legal needs. The answer to these problems may come in the form of artificial intelligence, which can be used to expedite legal research. In response to this problem, one computer scientist named Jimoh Ovbiagele has created what is known as ROSS Intelligence – an artificially intelligent “digital assistant” to assist attorneys.
ROSS Intelligence began as a research project at the University of Toronto in 2014. ROSS was built on IBM Watson, a cognitive system that can answer questions in natural language. The goal of ROSS is to act as an “Artificial intelligence lawyer that helps human lawyers research faster and focus on advising clients.” Today, ROSS acts as a legal research assistant that helps scale the abilities of lawyers through artificial intelligence technology.
ROSS works to quickly respond to questions posed after searching through legal documents. Attorneys can orally ask ROSS legal questions, and ROSS will respond while showing users what the citations are for its responses. ROSS gets its legal information from a legal publisher, although the name of the publisher has not yet been revealed. The more ROSS is used, the more it improves its responses. Also, if the laws change, ROSS will be able to track whether it affects the case cited. This will enable attorneys to focus on the individual facts of a client’s case, while spending less time on mundane tasks like sifting through legal documents.
Law firms have already jumped on the idea of using artificial intelligence for legal research. Prominent law firms such as Baker Hostetler, Latham & Watkins and Wisconsin’s von Brisen & Roper have begun licensing ROSS Intelligence. “We believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients,” said Bob Craig, Baker & Hostetler’s chief information officer.
Obviagele believes that ROSS Intelligence will allow legal services to be delivered at a more affordable price. However, a concern is that ROSS Intelligence will begin to replace jobs in an already struggling legal market. In response to this concern, Obviagele emphasizes that ROSS cannot advise clients on what they should do. “We give lawyers the information; it’s their job to make the judgment call, which requires a lot of things computers can’t do,” Ovbiagele says. “A lot of people talk about Ross replacing jobs. Really, it just makes the jobs easier.”
As of May 2016, ROSS Intelligence had commercially rolled out its bankruptcy law module. Now, ROSS is building more legal practice modules into the ROSS system. It will only be a matter of time before ROSS Intelligence becomes commonplace in law firms across the United States.