 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good morning, and aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. And today, we have a topic that is interesting to me and the future of law. It's called Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of Law, and my guest is Priya Rasheed, Ms. Rasheed is a Juris Doctoral Candidate, Class of 2018 at the University of Hawaii's William S. Richardson School of Law. As part of her studies, Ms. Rasheed has developed an insight into the influence of artificial intelligence on the practice of law. And today, we're going to talk about where that is now, where it's going, and what it means, what it means for the practice of law in the future, what it means right now, what do we have to learn. First, however, I want to ask Ms. Rasheed, or Priya, may I call you Priya? Yes, of course. Priya, why do you want to become a lawyer? How did you get into that? Isn't there enough stress in life without taking an occupation or career that gives you more? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Mark. You know, I'm a 30-year law student, and I'm still answering that question. I came to law school because I loved to read, and I loved to write, and they said, you know, there's a profession where that's literally all you do is read, write, and help problem solve, and so I'm still figuring that out. I have loved school so far, and I've loved studying in Hawaii, and I have been exceptionally lucky to study international law and technological ethics and problem solving, so I've been extremely lucky. Okay, all right, so that's the real Priya. Now, artificial intelligence, what is artificial intelligence? Give us a definition of that, please, and then I want to go into what it does to the law or what's happening in the law today. First, tell me, put a face, if you will, on artificial intelligence, a real face. Well, that's a mouthful, but artificial intelligence is the systems and the designs that essentially want to replicate and enhance human intelligence, and they generally require a high amount of human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making. Anything that you've thought of as a smart computer probably has an aspect of artificial intelligence, and as we enter into an increasingly technological world, more things will have this smart intelligence, this human intelligence without the human. Okay, now, you said it includes human intelligence, that's part of it. Now, right, you said that artificial intelligence includes human intelligence, is that right, but does that mean you have to be intelligent to watch it or get it, or does it mean that's how you create it? A little bit, maybe, as somebody that is not a tech savvy person, I don't think you need a high level of intelligence or tech savvy to appreciate artificial intelligence, I want that to be known. Okay, that's good, thank you. I think my computer is very old, I think three years old, which is very old in the tech world, and my cell phone is five years old, so that gives you any indication of my tech savvy, it's minimal, but it's important because if we talk about artificial intelligence, from the very beginning, in the 1950s when artificial intelligence became a buzzword and something important, it always was an imitation game to make it as human like as possible, and we want our computers to be, that's what we aspire, is that humans are the special thing and computers enhance them. So the computer takes these traits and that's part of artificial intelligence and enhances them? Well, I would preface this with, excuse me, computers don't really do anything. Okay. Computers, we shouldn't anthropomorphize, we shouldn't give them human like qualities or animal like qualities because they're just still this thing in front of us. They don't have a soul, they don't have an intent. They don't have power unless we give it to them. I see. Give it to them, and even I do it when I'm speaking about computers. Okay, so computers, we know about computers, artificial intelligence, I'm getting a feel for it. It enhances the human qualities and it's something we can go online maybe and find out about. What is artificial intelligence and the practice of law? So to begin with, artificial intelligence and the practice of law is just like any other profession in any other area, and I joke around with people and I say the first people that are going to get hit are the doctors, the truck drivers and the lawyers because it just shows how unspecial we are and for us the unique and special thing about our profession is that we're paid to think, we're paid to problem solve and so doing that accurately, doing that in a socially proper manner, those are things computers can't do. But having the right information, having the perfect processing for e-discovery, knowing that there are 30,000 cases that are applicable to this problem that your client is facing, it can be overwhelming, but it can also be extremely empowering to an attorney. So alright, how did it start? How did it begin? For artificial intelligence and the law, what were the beginnings of it? And how did attorneys begin to use artificial intelligence to their advantage and I guess to the disadvantage of opponents at times, you know? I guess that would be the logical non-computer conclusion that I would make. Well, I would say that as a profession we have been extremely resilient and stubborn when it comes to integrating lawyers, stubborn, never know. But we actually should be surprised at how resilient we have been to automation and artificial intelligence and to tell you the truth, we borrow so much technology and so many ideas from other areas of our lives. So for example, the computer processing and the computer power that has emerged in the last 20 years, we are being given extreme power and instead of utilizing it early on in the 70s and 80s, we pretty much decided that we were going to use junior associates as our robots for these massive due diligence projects and massive discovery projects when we could have been making initial investment into the technology. We chose as a profession because of how special our client relationships are, how important the consequences were that these tasks belong to humans and we made that decision early on but now we're competing against the medical field and for example gene sequencing, these areas that require a lot of computer processing are now saying, how come the lawyers never use these computers? How come they aren't using these for these millions of cases around the world to problem solve? And we're looking at them without a very good answer because we could have saved clients a lot of money, we could have saved junior associates a lot of suffering maybe if we had started to automate and integrate artificial intelligence earlier. At the current state that we're at right now, all of the magic circle firms, all of the larger firms over 400 people have either started massively investing into artificial intelligence technology or have already integrated into their due diligence, their discovery processes and their major billable hours, their major income generating areas. And so it's pretty scary to think that maybe the small and mid-sized firms are threatened by a massive disruption in the legal field and so that's where I'm interested in how do we protect these small and mid-sized firms from this automation disruption. Okay, so who are the magic firms, magic circle firms, what does that mean? So that's a colloquial phrase to reference these traditionally large, large mega firms. They use Swiss-Ferrine structures to have I should use this colloquially, franchises around the world and essentially they run the corporate structures and network whether it's corporate contracting, arbitration, dispute and litigation, mediation all of these large private international law and they're the ones who are harnessing artificial intelligence. When did this start? I mean I think that when it came to the control function on our keyboard and us realizing that in discovery actually having it on a computer was faster than having the printout was when lawyers started realizing these big cardboard boxes were not going to be the future and most of it was cheap, most of it was what you could get on a Microsoft word processor to what was built in every single computer and then they realized it wasn't specialized enough and so in the late 90s lawyers started realizing there are specialized tools for example dragon dictation which was commonly used by doctors lawyers said why should I hire a paralegal to do my dictation when I could but now with most attorneys being high level typists that also became a little bit of a fad and so we've been trying to integrate these fads as quickly as possible and see what stays. But I sense from what you said earlier there was initially kind of a reluctance that we our profession deals with other people and really you really need a human attorney we can't send this out to a machine but that's changed because of the other professions so I sort of spurred that on it's what I hear you saying Yes and I think there were two factors to consider in the reason that has happened one we have a very insular profession we believe in the client relationship we are one of the few professions that we regulate ourselves we license ourselves and that's a privilege but it's also a great responsibility and when it came to technology almost we're a bit arrogant in saying that it wasn't going to be us it was going to be the doctors and the truck drivers but not us and I think that that also happened to coincide with the increasing litigation costs and clients saying that you're not bringing the value that I need and so for example several major contracts in the last ten years in the United Kingdom, in Spain, in Italy the United States actually started saying we refuse to pay in the contract we refuse to pay for anything that could be done by a paralegal we refuse to give billable hours to anything that could be done by a junior associate and it started to make firms, large partners think to themselves well why should I have a junior associate if I'm not going to be getting billable hours for them and then it became another matter of how do you get the work done in the most efficient way and a lot of the times the answer became computers for large firms who could overcome the cost barriers so what I hear you saying actually is that it's all about money in a way, in a way that sort of started especially with the international firms and now we hear that the international firms are developing at full speed ahead is artificial intelligence and I'm going to, we're going to take a break but I want to ask you after the break what are they doing with it and what can the small firms do to compete and then where, how far does artificial intelligence go and you told us it doesn't have a soul you intimated that, I said that but can we blame it for anything but let's take a break and then we'll ask those questions This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness You can be the greatest You can be the best You can be the king Come play in all your chess You can be the one who can talk to God Don't bangin' on his door I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I present Think Tech Hawaii's research in Manoa where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest both to Hawaii and around the world So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's research in Manoa Welcome back I'm Mark Schlaufe, host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Cross the Sea and my guest, Priya Rashid and I are talking about artificial intelligence and the practice of law and Priya, when we broke you were talking about how large law firms are now getting into it this makes more sense from the bottom line it appears and at one time the profession felt well, you only have to deal with attorneys that kind of sacrosanct feeling is kind of dissolved What are the law firms doing? What are the basic uses of artificial intelligence with these large law firms, first of all how are they being used? Well, so for example most large law firms have started to integrate natural language processing and machine learning and so that means intake instead of having a paralegal or a junior associate integrate clients a machine might do it and then this secondary or tertiary step is a junior associate or a paralegal So what does the machine do in that respect? So the machine actually tries to I'm sorry, do we call the machine or artificial intelligence? I mean, there are probably I think roughly about 20 or 30 mainstream systems and systems is a great way to catch all and these systems try to read things such as word patterns I'm worried about my divorce we have been fighting for 8 months there's been a crime committed things like that and they try to almost problem solve pre-problem solve and give the lawyer a time-saving tool Like a summary or something? A summary is just a minimal top of thing that can happen but for example it might actually begin to take the next step to say this is the problem this is the choice of forum this is the forum of where the case should be disputed this is the probability of success and this is the probability of cost Do you think that this client and also the probability of payment sometimes which is really important for mid-sized and small firms of client payment What else besides that? Well, I think that on the other side so for small and mid-sized firms many of them have already started integrating case law analysis so for example Bloomberg is a legal service provider and they have started to do case mapping so making information much easier to take in and absorb so that a lawyer can become faster and take on more clients so things like that are common tools common machine learning tools and another example I would use is for example legal aid and legal aid whole they already have a chat box that was made this past year and they never Richardson candidate in my cohort and what they did was they had a grant from Microsoft and AmeriCorps and they actually gave them the funds to create an intake box a chat box and ironically the students name is Chad so we call it the chat box but it's if you think about legal aid as a smaller mid-sized firm and they're extremely under resourced they're helping indigent populations and people that really need this service they deserve that type of artificial intelligence and that automation so they can help as many people as possible so somebody would call up describe their problem and the system would the system would give them a range of possibilities so for example when you go on to legal aid site and you type in your problem you might say I have landlord-tenant dispute and I've been living there for four years but I don't have a lease the computer can pick up that it's going to be a matter of a non-written contract these big problems that happen when you do or don't have a contract and the computer can guide the information in a certain way and kind of guide a conversation almost the way a human being would ok and so the system the computer, the machine will take, do an analysis of some sort internally by I guess going through and finding out what words are in common and then send something to an associate or attorney then what does the attorney do with that well so for example the attorney can triage the cases what cases need to be responded to now versus this afternoon versus tomorrow morning which is extremely important those types of decisions are much greater efficiency but also like I told you about adding predictability and information to the client that client can get information immediately which lawyers have mixed feelings about but in terms of the legal profession and also society there is really nothing wrong with people having information faster and in fact it's an indication of a good society when people can have the things they need and whether that's comfort or information as quickly as possible and artificial intelligence through the legal field can provide that ok so let me do a couple of follow ups here now what's going to happen to these associates and these paralegals and these secretaries law secretaries and assistants with if something comes in isn't that going to take jobs away or are we what is technology doing here what's going to happen well fundamentally if you think about what we do as humans what do we enjoy doing we enjoy problem solving we enjoy client relationships generally if you come to work and you can do something robotic and you click 30 times a day there is a justification that a robot should maybe do your job for efficiency but I don't believe that the members of the legal profession are likely to be impacted by immediate or unexpected suffering through unemployment in fact what I believe is I think that when I graduate I'm going to get a job that I love much more than if I had to do 80 hour weeks of due diligence checks because I think that the partner will expect from me to be a better problem solver because that is the best investment into this associate and so I do wonder if members of my class are going to be maladapted or ill adapted to the new legal profession but I also think that if you're a critical thinker if you're a hard worker and you bring something new to the table every day you wake up with a creative mind as a problem solver I don't believe that your job will be as at risk as you might believe it to be so I hear you saying use the technology to advance your job you'll have a job but you'll use the technology the technology won't take your job away you will use the technology to enhance your job well I think that in all professions the theme of artificial intelligence is really that technology can enhance the things that make us human and special and so for example problem solving with a client is often limited because of the research the sheer amount of time it takes to research draft memos, file briefs and the high stakes require you know strict scrutiny but if you had a computer checking you double checking you how much time could you spend conversing with the client how much time could you spend thinking of novel ideas so those are the things that most lawyers enjoy and love and those are the things that make us human ok so I got a couple follow up things I want to ask you first of all do law firms charge for the time of the computer? is that a billable hour? do we have a system that now goes on the bill saying I am charging so much per hour for that is that how they do it I don't think that the model rules of ethics would let computers receive billable hours because it's just you know not the way of the world but I also believe that there is a serious cost barrier to entering into artificial intelligence and I do believe clients will feel it in their charges and in their cost layouts but there may not be a world with billable hours in the next 20 years it may be service based fees but not quite contingency fees I think that it actually will make the legal profession have to reconsider why is it paying so much why is cost so high in litigation and things like that and I think it will bring the total price of legal services down and I don't know if our salaries will actually go down but it will so that actually is good for the market and good for efficiency okay so will the small firms be able to compete still I think I'm hearing you say that they can use this technology they're not going to be bought out it's within the price range of smaller firms well there is a cost but as we know we have some of the highest numbers of solo practitioners in the country per capita in Hawaii I believe that it's up to each individual attorney whether you are flexible and able to adapt to this new cost sharing scheme and using artificial intelligence is a very difficult question to answer especially for individual attorneys but I would say this it is an opportunity for small firms to leverage technology and go head to head with larger firms and I do believe that in a client perspective you get the attention of a small firm and if the technology is there that means that the best quality is the best of our profession high quality, low cost okay now my last question for you okay what do we do to prepare for the future what's your advice and suggestions for lawyers to prepare for the future with artificial intelligence well my conclusion and advice, personal advice is that you should consider this a positive thing, a good thing because it is inevitable and I truly believe that the greater flexibility any person has but especially a lawyer it will only make you a better problem solver and a better service provider for your client if you can be flexible, if you look and know about the tools that are available to you so you can be a better tool for your client and so like I said accept it embrace it, maybe internalize it and think to yourself in a new place that I'm going to be successful in and also continue to be a human, a real person in light of the artificial intelligence still can maintain your strength as a person yes exactly, I think that when we practice law we should harness the things that make us special our ability to interpret political, moral, social constructs whether something is good whether something can be done versus whether it should be done where we can be true stewards of this artificial intelligence movement as lawyers for corporations, for governments that's what lawyers are meant to do and then hopefully we'll have more time because of artificial intelligence to go home and hug our children and be with our families that's very nice very nice thought, thank you Priya Rashid thank you very much for being my guest today you're welcome Mark