March 17, 2020

contracts adoption machine learning technology and digital data science legaltech contraxsuite daniel katz covid-19 coronavirus artifical intelligence

Following our post from last week, the team has been hard at work building out our COVID-19 module for contract analysis. I thought I might offer a few thoughts about the development of a COVID-19 AI Module specifically, as well as some ideas more broadly about AI + Law Adoption.

AI + Law Adoption

I know many people have experienced some disillusionment when it comes to AI + Law. In my travels, some have justifiably noted significant practical challenges associated with leveraging many of the existing tools on the market. These challenges include the need to develop large numbers of training examples in order to generate appropriate levels of accuracy, various types of infosec requirements, as well as the need to integrate the outputs from any AI module with other information and actors.

Here is how I like to describe the state of play. For AI to successfully deploy, a problem must clear the bar of both Economics and Engineering. For example, from an economic perspective, it is hard to justify building a machine to analyze just a handful of documents. From an engineering perspective, some problems (mainly involving the deep nuances of legal language) are not possible at this point.

A Flexible Toolkit 

We built ContraxSuite as a flexible toolkit to project into any emerging problem. We are engineering our flexible toolkit to help organizations navigate various challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our solution to this problem involves more than merely applying some pre-baked field, such as identification of the presence of Force Majeure clause but involves helping our Subject Matter Experts answer a series of key business questions.

Subject Matter Experts + Machines

LexPredict joined forces with Elevate in response to observed demand from customers centered around generating cost-effective high-fidelity results to various problems.

Today we derive results from the combination of people, process, and technology (not technology alone). In other words, useful AI technology is just one component of an effective solution. Combining the technology of LexPredict with a global law company like Elevate put us in a position to spec and build solutions, and combine them with people and process to deliver results.

For most problems in law (particularly the complex multidisciplinary ones), both machines alone and humans alone are intrinsically limited in their ability to deliver cost-effective high-fidelity results. But when properly paired, humans + machines can drastically improve both the fidelity and the cost of any project.

Conclusion

Helping navigate COVID-19 is the latest in multidisciplinary problems that require a multidisciplinary team. We stand ready at Elevate to support both the technology side and the services side of your COVID-19 needs.