Continental Breakfast: your daily update on what’s happening in Europe.
Paralegals, run for your lives: The machines are taking over. Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly hot topic in Big Law over the past few years, with Baker & Hostetler, Clifford Chance, DLA Piper, Dentons, Latham & Watkins, Linklaters and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz among those to have implemented machine learning technology to help cut costs and improve efficiency.
The latest to go digital is U.K. magic circle firm Slaughter and May, which has signed a deal with Luminance, a new technology company that launched today with the backing of investment fund Invoke Capital. Slaughters has been working with Luminance for several months to help it develop its artificial intelligence software, which is able to read hundreds of pages of legal documentation every minute and is designed to speed up the due diligence process.
As someone who has watched The Terminator movie, I find the combination of “artificial intelligence” and “slaughter” somewhat terrifying, and while document review technology is unlikely to wipe out the human race and claim the planet for its own, it could prove fatal for the paralegals and junior lawyers that handle such process-driven work. Perhaps it’s a mercy: My colleague Michael Goldhaber described Millennial contract lawyers as “the screwed generation,” adding that big-ticket document discovery is now “conducted on blinking screens in dreary warehouses, by armies of temps with high debt and low pay, no benefits and no future.” Ouch.
In some respects, Slaughters is an unlikely early adopter of AI technology. The firm isn’t exactly known for innovation or being ahead of the curve. Quite the opposite, in fact: Slaughters prides itself on tradition and restraint. It is the only top U.K. firm not to have converted to a limited liability partnership and does not publicly disclose—or discuss—its financial performance. Save for small outposts in Brussels, Paris, Beijing and Hong Kong, it has eschewed globalization in favor of referral relationships with firms it quaintly refers to as its “best friends.” It was only relatively recently that Slaughters started doing marketing and PR. The fact that such a conservative and change-averse firm has jumped on the AI bandwagon is a pretty clear indication that this technology is not just a passing fad. Expect to see more firms license AI technology in the near future.
An interesting side note: Invoke Capital was founded by members of the senior management team at U.K. enterprise software company Autonomy, including CEO Mike Lynch. Slaughters has close ties to Autonomy, having advised the company on its hugely controversial $11 billion sale to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The following year, HP was forced to write down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion and accused the company’s executives, including Lynch, of “accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations.” A flurry of litigation ensued between HP, its shareholders and the former Autonomy execs. The debacle is still rumbling on, with HP suing Lynch and Autonomy’s former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain for $5.1 billion in a case that is set to go to trial in London in 2018.
http://www.law.com/sites/almstaff/2016/09/14/rise-of-the-machines-continues-as-another-top-firm-signs-ai-deal/
