Technological advances mean that law practice is changing too

October 03, 2017, Kitchener, Ontario

Posted by: Robert Deutschmann, Personal Injury Lawyer

AI and other technology are not only changing the way we drive (driver assist technology for example), but it is changing medicine, retail, and law.

Millions of pages of legal decisions reside in law libraries across Canada. They represent the totality of the law in Canada and are key to any litigation case establishing precedents, and new interpretations of existing laws. Once upon a time (not so long ago) lawyers would have clerks who could spend days or even weeks looking for legal precedents in libraries across Canada.

Three years ago though, a trio of University of Toronto alumni decided that there was a future in AI and the law. They pitched their idea of Ross the computer to Y Combinator (a start up incubator in Silicon Valley) and were accepted. Ross was a great idea, and the trio of founders got the support (financial and technological) that they needed to complete the project.  VCs thought the idea had potential as well, and invested in the company. The trio named their AI device Ross the robot – an AI assistant that is happy to help lawyers find legal precedents.

They ‘taught’ Ross how to find the right answers by iteration. They would pose a legal question and let Ross find the answer, they would then show Ross the correct answer. After time Ross ‘learned’ what it was expected to return as the correct search results. This process took months and hundreds of thousands of searches.

Ross is a ‘clever’ dude. While once upon a time we would go to the libraries, then lawyers began searching individual online databases like LexusNexus and did keyword searches that returned results in cases, sometimes by the dozens that had to be read, Ross does better. With Ross, you input your legal question in natural language (not keywords) and ‘he’ will go through the volumes of legal cases in seconds, analyzing your question and finding the exact answer to it.

In head to head testing a lawyer posed a legal question and went to work with traditional research methods. It took 10 hours to find the answer that Ross found in four seconds. When you consider that lawyers charge by the hour – this represents thousands of dollars of savings that can be passed on to the clients who have begun to push back heavily against the perceived high costs.

They trio of founders  Pargles Dall'Oglio, Andrew Arruda and Jimoh Ovbiagel have now opened a new AI lab Ross North in Toronto that employs 10 people. Toronto is recognized globally as a centre of excellence in AI and has a great talent pool to draw from locally and internationally.

About Deutschmann Law

Deutschmann Law serves South-Western Ontario with offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Woodstock, Brantford, Stratford and Ayr. The law practice of Robert Deutschmann focuses almost exclusively in personal injury and disability insurance matters. For more information, please visit www.deutschmannlaw.com or call us at 1-519-742-7774.

It is important that you review your accident benefit file with one of our experienced personal injury / car accident lawyers to ensure that you obtain access to all your benefits which include, but are limited to, things like physiotherapy, income replacement benefits, vocational retraining and home modifications.