Legal brains, big data and artificial intelligence – a shifting balance

I am not sure how far this is true of other managing partners, but I confess to being quite a fan of data. Not just chargeable hours, work in progress, lockup days and the like, but the really granular stuff like meeting room occupancy, desk usage, website hits. Actually, more than the raw data, it's the patterns that can be so interesting.

Along the way, I have picked up some elementary data modelling skills and will often work with my management colleagues to set about solving a problem by finding and analysing the best data we can generate. More often than not, combining grade-school statistics with forty-something intuition takes us some useful way towards the path to a solution.

That my efforts in this respect are small beer though was brought home at a recent conference I attended and, in particular, the demonstration of a leading e-billing solution, which gathers, analysis and processes law firm billing data on the scale of an industrial conglomerate. Data already captured in its warehouse apparently exceeds that which would be recorded by the entire UK legal services industry in a whole year. That's millions and millions of law firm data records.

Such systems and data warehouses are already shifting commercial power further towards the buy side of our industry, with the tools being available to general counsel to manage and audit law firm billing practices on a far more rigorous basis than before.

That may be a pain point for some firms which have been challenged on their practices and held to account for unintended billing errors, but I'd guess it's just the beginning. Where this must go at some point is massive processing power being brought to bear on the deeper patterns swirling and twisting within those gigantic data sets.

As with store loyalty cards, climate modelling or asset price movements, the more data you have and the more firepower you apply to it, the greater your insights can become. So, some of the answers to the quest for efficiency that so many firms are on may lie in that data, containing as they do minute detail on how different legal teams have worked and the results that their approaches have brought about.

If links can be established between good or bad outcomes and particular working patterns, then improvements, best practices and even mandated project planning could follow. As with disaggregation, process mapping and the like, the early discoveries will come in simpler, more routine work, but may in time move into the more complex.

For some legal professionals, such an outcome would be bad enough, but even the notion of big data teaching lawyers how to lawyer may not be the biggest thing to worry about. The artificial intelligence community is having a visible impact in other fields of complex service delivery (Watson MD for example) and the law, too, is receiving some attention.

As a profession, we've spent recent years resisting the notion that some of our work can be unbundled and outsourced to fellow humans. But, we may soon need to move on from that to confront the possibility that far greater amounts of it can be done (even done better) by intelligent but inorganic systems. With the biggest players in the technology world focusing their attention and investment dollars on the artificial intelligence community (Deep Mind is a case in point), it may be a case of watch this space before someone (or something) is watching it for you.