I spent most of last week in the Midtown Hilton in New York City attending Legaltech 2017, or Legalweek: The Experience, or some sort of variation of the two. For the most part, it pretty much had the same feel as every other Legaltech Ive attended. But I agree with my fellow Above the Law tech columnist, Bob Ambrogi, that ALM deserves kudos for trying to change the focus a bit. It may take a year or two of experimentation to get it right, but at least theyre trying.

This year, one of the topics that popped up over and over throughout the conference was artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the practice of law. In part the AI focus was attributable to the Keynote speaker on the opening day of the conference,Andrew McAfee, author of The Second Machine Age(affiliate link). His talk focused on ways that AI would disrupt business as usual in the years to come. His predictions were in part premised on his assertion that key technologies had improved greatly in recent years and as a result were in the midst of a convergence of these technologies such that AI is finally coming of age.

I was particularly excited about this keynote sinceId started reading McAfeesbook in mid-December after Klaus Schauser, the CTO of AppFolio, MyCases parent company, recommended it to me. As McAfee explains in his book, its abundantly clear that AI is already having an incredible impact on other industries.

But what about the legal industry? I started mulling over this issue last September after attending ILTA in D.C. andwriting about a few different legal software platforms grounded in AI concepts. Because I find this topic to be so interesting, I decided to hone in on it during my interviews at Legaltech as well, which I livestreamed via Periscope.

First I met with Mark Noel, managing director of professional services at Catalyst Repository Systems. After he shared the news ofCatalysts latest release, Insight Enterprise, a platform for corporate general counsel designed to centralize and streamline discovery processes, we turned to AI and his thoughts on how it will affect the legal industry over the next year. He believes that AI will eventually manage the more tedious parts of practicing law, thus allowing lawyers to focus on the analytical aspects that tend to be more interesting: Some of the types of tasks lawyers are best at I dont see AI taking over anytime soon. A lot of what lawyers work with is justice, fairness, and equity, which are more abstract. The ultimate goal of legal practice the human practitioner is going to have to do, but the the grunt work and repeatable stuff like discovery which is becoming more onerous because of growing data volumes those are the kinds of things these tools can take over for us. You can watch the full interview here.

Next I spoke with AJ Shankar, the founder of Everlaw, an ediscovery platform that recently rolled out an integrated litigation case management tool as well, which I wrote about here. According to AJ, AI is undergoing a renaissance across many different industries. But when it comes to the legal space, its a different story. AI is not ready to make the tough judgments that lawyers make, but it is ready to augment human processes. AI will become a very important assistant for you. It will work hand in hand with humans who will then provide the valuable context. You can watch the full interview here.

I also met with Jack Grow, the president of LawToolBox, which provides calendaring and docketing softwareand he talked to me about their latest integration with DocuSign. Then we moved onto AI and Jack suggested that in the short term, the focus would be on aggregating the data needed to build useful AI platforms for the legal industry. Over the next year software vendors will figure out how to collect better data that can be consumed for analysis later on, so it can be put into an algorithm to make better use of it. Theyll be building the foundation and infrastructure so that they can later take advantage of artificial intelligence. You can watch the full interview here.

And last but certainly not least, I spoke with Jeremiah Kelman, the president of Everchron, a company that Ive covered previously, which provides a collaborative case management platform for litigators. Jeremiah predicts that AI will provide very targeted and specific improvements for lawyers. Replacement of lawyers sounds interesting, but its more about leveraging the information you have and the data that is out there and using it to provide insights and give direction to lawyers as they do their tasks and speed up what they do. From research, ediscovery, case management, and things across the spectrum, well see it in targeted areas and youll get the most impact from leveraging and improving within the existing framework. You can watch the full interview here.

Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. Shes been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. Shes easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

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Legaltech 2017: Announcements, AI, And The Future Of Law - Above the Law