Comment by mikecb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikecb | Hacker News Reader

Love the idea and execution, but this is less an attorney and more a legal librarian. Attorneys spend most of their time on the facts of the case.

In law school, most lawyers are taught to present each argument in a standard format called IRAC: Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. The issue is like the question presented on the front page here: "can courts pierce the corporate veil where a corporation has misappropriated funds?" ROSS spits out the relevant rule, and any information it can find on how to interpret that rule in specific situations. However, this is only the beginning of a lawyer's job. The largest part is taking that rule and actually applying it to the facts of the specific case. ROSS doesn't seem to be able to do this, yet. Finally, and least importantly, the lawyer comes up with a conclusion (or a series of probability-weighted conclusions). ROSS doesn't seem to be able to do this either. In law school and in court, it's not enough to cite the rule of law. It's much more important to apply the reasoning of the rule to every specific fact in the specific case.

It would be very interesting to see this intelligence applied not just to legal research, as here, but to e-discovery, which is the other time intensive task given to associates and contract attorneys. That would, I think, be the next step into turning this into a general purpose attorney that _would_ be able to handle the analysis and perhaps conclusory stage of a legal issue.

If anyone who worked on ROSS is here, where did you purchase your corpus from? West or lexis? How are you doing shepardizing and pruning of bad law?

Right now, there are a lot of billable hours for what Ross can do in seconds. I don't think it's unfair to say that this is replacing a substantial portion of _some_ lawyer's jobs.

I'd like to see a concrete description of the difference between what ROSS gives you versus what, say, LexisNexis does.

If its just giving you a simple answers and not actually producing the kind of research results a research attorney using traditional research tools would -- where the simple answer would be part of the heading, but sources and analysis would be part of the report -- its not going to be useful except as a novelty. In law, its rarely as important to get a simple answer as to have an answer that you can support as most correct and explain why other potential answers are less correct for the specific circumstances.

And, from the vague marketing hype, it doesn't seem like what is really needed in law is what ROSS is being sold as doing.

My guess is that it's roughly analogous to the difference between Wolfram and Google.

One is actually computing on the data to combine it in novel ways.

The other is the one I use.

(Snarky, but as much as I try, the only thing I've found WA useful is for COLA comps)

Great comment. What ROSS does in addition to what you've described is ask questions against the context of a case. The case facts (inputed by users) will be factored into the queries so as to produce the most relevant information (rules, precedents and other connections across a vast body law) that would take an associate (especially a junior) many hours to unlock. And absolutely, ROSS is not the end. The quality of the execution lies in a legal researcher working well with a cognitive system that provides around-the-clock legal intelligence. And e-discovery is definitely on the radar for the future.

Sounds awesome. What sort of computational cost does each query take?

Interesting, IRAC sounds a lot like SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) notes used in medicine.

Probably very similar. It's designed to make lawyers think methodically about a problem to avoid errors of logic and construction.

Yes, e-discovery is definitely the missing piece here. At the end of the day, lawyers need to be empowered by technology to do their job better, and ultimately make the legal system better.

And it should be called RICK.

E-discovery has already gone through an impressive cost deflation with the application of more sophisticated scanning, OCR, and search algorithms that recently (in the past decade) came onto the market. I've seen more than a few law firms that developed an over-dependency upon discovery-related fees in their business model either drastically downsize, abruptly change, or in one case shutter their doors entirely (after a painful circling the drain).

If deep learning technology like Watson deflates further the remaining e-discovery market as well as the initial case research billables, it will be interesting to watch how law firms adjust their business models. For those that can stand out with consistently innovative, novel and creative legal services delivery (like nearly always coming up with newly-accepted interpretations of case law) that depends upon people, I could easily see rates for those attorneys go dramatically up, partly to backfill the revenue gap that is created in the wake of automation of these aspects of legal services business models, partly due to an exacerbation of the bifurcation effect automation seems to have upon labor markets.

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