Lawyers at the larger firms usually have to deal with long work
hours, few vacations and difficulties in achieving a fair work-
life balance. And the entry level workers at law firms typically
spend hundreds of hours sifting through thousands of
precedents and articles to prepare for cases. BakerHostetler, an
Ohio-based law firm founded in 1916, is taking an innovative
approach to make life easier for its employees by hiring a
robotic legal researcher called ROSS. Specifically, ROSS will
start out by working for the bankruptcy team at BakerHostetler.
ROSS Intelligence co-founder Andrew Arruda told Quartz that
other law firms are also planning to sign licenses for using the
artificial intelligence research program as well.
ROSS was built on IBM Watson, a cognitive
system that can answer questions in natural language. ROSS
will be able to quickly respond to questions after searching
through billions of documents. Lawyers can ask ROSS
questions in plain English such as “what is the Freedom of
Information Act?” And ROSS will show users what the citations
are for its responses. The more ROSS is used by lawyers, the
more it improves its responses. If the laws change, then ROSS
will be able to track whether it affects the case. Essentially,
lawyers will be able to avoid some of the mundane tasks in
favor of being able to focus on the nitty gritty aspects of each
case.
“At BakerHostetler, 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
BakerHostetler Chief Information Officer Bob Craig in a
statement . “We are proud to team up with innovators like ROSS
and we will continue to explore these cutting-edge technologies
as they develop.” BakerHostetler has been testing out ROSS
since it was first deployed.
ROSS Intelligence started out as a research project at the
University of Toronto in 2014. And the goal of ROSS
Intelligence from the beginning was to build a legal research
assistant to help scale the abilities of lawyers through artificial
intelligence technology.
Backed by the Y Combinator startup accelerator, ROSS
Intelligence moved from Toronto to Palo Alto in June 2015. It
took about ten months for ROSS to learn bankruptcy law before
it commercially rolled out. Now ROSS Intelligence is building
more legal practice modules into the ROSS system beyond
bankruptcy.
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