Artificial intelligence is transforming the legal services industry and will lead to better quality client service
Round table at South Summit, the Summit for Entrepreneurs
Artificial intelligence is transforming the legal services industry and its main effect will be better quality client service. This was one of the main conclusions of the round table entitled How artificial intelligence is changing law firms, held today as part of South Summit, the summit for entrepreneurs in Southern Europe, which runs this week in Madrid.
“Artificial intelligence will take our sector into a new dimension, although not in the short term. With the ultimate aim of providing value to clients, inspiring trust and offering better quality service, at Garrigues we are harnessing the multitude of options offered by technology to provide our lawyers with the tools necessary to be more productive and reduce response times,” affirmed the firm’s CIO, César Mejías.
José Ángel Sandín, CEO of publishing house Lefebvre - El Derecho, added that, “Artificial intelligence and, above all, automation, are already transforming the legal services industry. We must adapt our roles to this new reality and, in our case, we do so directly with our clients in mind, who demand quick, affordable and tailor-made solutions that we can only offer if we combine technology and quality content.”
Álvaro Barbero, director of Algorithm Engineering at Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento (IIC), stressed that “the main revolution will not only be in terms of automation but also in terms of prescriptive analytics, since artificial intelligence systems will generate valuable recommendations that will improve lawyer decision-making.” In his opinion, machine learning solutions aimed, for example, at reducing the length of lawsuits “will help clients to make decisions.”
According to the three experts, within a law firm there are an infinite number of tasks that professionals spend a long time on but that provide little value: transcriptions from the courts, review of contracts on a major scale, extracting data from different documents, review of uncertified extracts, identification of potential fraud, etc. “Artificial intelligence enables us to automate work of lesser value and increase our professionals’ productivity, giving them more time to provide added value to clients,” explained Mejías. “At Garrigues innovation forms part of our DNA and we are at the forefront of the use of artificial intelligence and robotics in the sector. For example, together with IIC, we have developed the first tool in Spanish that allows scanned legal texts, videos and audio to be transcribed and indexed quickly and easily, with minimal errors, a functionality that facilitates the work of our lawyers while at the same time improving our client response times. Proces@ includes advanced search options, legal dictionaries, etc., meaning that it has sufficient context to make sense of any text it is given. We are the first law firm in the world to have a robot of these characteristics in Spanish.”
As regards employment, Sandín believes that artificial intelligence will lead to a “major transformation of legal and paralegal services,” while Mejías considers “it will modify lawyer profiles. It is increasingly important for lawyers to have technological skills, meaning that one of the challenges is to have more professionals with the necessary training in this field”. Garrigues is one of the first law firms in Spain to have engineers on its workforce; we have multidisciplinary, technology-oriented teams and we have a specific area dedicated to information and communication technology.
The 1st Legal Tech Competition, organized by Garrigues and Spain Startup, will take place at South Summit tomorrow. The four finalists will have the opportunity to present their projects and the judges will choose a winner, who will receive free advisory services from Garrigues professionals.