Anna Lozynski has now shared the results of her industry polling on the heels of a successful and engaging Clubhouse open forum where legal professionals were, for the first time, able to openly discuss their internal fears and misconceptions with AI's rise in the workplace.

AI Will Replace My Job

We hear this fear a lot and not just from professionals in the legal industry. AI coming to replace jobs has been circulated by various news sources as an inevitability for decades. Our view on the subject is that we are entering a new era of work. So far, there have been four distinct eras of humankind as defined by the way we work:

First was the hunter-gatherer period, which lasted several millennia. Then came the agricultural period, which lasted several thousand years. Afterward came the Industrial Revolution, which lasted a few centuries. And finally, we entered the Information Age, which has consisted of the last few decades. Moving forward, we are entering the Augmented Age, where humans and AI/Robots will coexist to become even more productive and more capable together.

As it stands, AI is still limited by its training and the data made available to it.  In many ways no different than the passive tools we have used in the past. This new era will introduce solutions that work collaboratively with humankind’s creativity and enable us to do much more than ever before.

AI is Difficult to Implement

AI (or Natural Language Processing) has traditionally been seen as difficult to implement because it has required vast training data sets and many hours invested in organizing that data to get it to a point that the AI can recognize and use it.

In our field, LexCheck has a unique differentiator in that we require far fewer example documents to train our AI and we take on the vast majority of the implementation process in-house, easing the burden on our clients and making it a very simple process to get started quickly.

AI is not Accurate

AI has come a long way in the last 10 years and even more so in the last 5. The accuracy of the technologies used to solve complex problems such as chess, Go, or even the intricacies of contract negotiation have advanced very rapidly.

Most commonly, AI is evaluated on its "F1 Score" which tracks the precision and recall of the program. We are proud to share that LexCheck is capable of delivering higher F1 scores than even human reviewers after it is fully deployed and trained. This is a great boon to our clients as they are introducing a greater amount of consistency to their contract review process than even having a team of well-trained lawyers could provide.

AI is Expensive

To build an entire AI system from scratch would assuredly be quite costly, but with many vendors appearing offering AI software as a service, these costs have come dramatically down in the last decade. AI will soon be ubiquitous in every facet of our life as computing power and the tools to train the software become more prominent. At its current stage, AI for legal can be more affordable than a paralegal.

AI Contract Negotiation Platform: LexCheck

LexCheck is the only company in the world that has cracked the code in a way that for the first time enables a practical approach for AI to accomplish the review work of a lawyer in negotiating contracts. The company was founded by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Used by corporate legal departments and top-tier law firms, the LexCheck contract negotiation platform harnesses natural language processing to fully automate the work normally performed by legal staff in marking up and negotiating a business contract. 

The software is customized to the legal department’s own contract negotiation playbook, marking up and evaluating both first and third-party agreements as if a trained in-house attorney for that particular firm were doing the review. Training attorneys to do this kind of review is expensive and time-consuming. And while outsourcing can save money, it can result in sub-par quality. LexCheck delivers control, consistency, time and money savings, and potential compliance damage risk mitigation. 

Perhaps most impressive though, is LexCheck’s ability to review and return a contract in under three minutes.  Legal departments can then complete their own analysis of the findings, accept the changes, or simply attach the suggestions to the contracts they are forwarding to the counter-party. This improves the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of legal departments that handle contract negotiations for frequently used business agreements like non-disclosure agreements, software license agreements, and master service agreements.