Lexpert Magazine

50 LEXPERT MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018 | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | in from the managing partner and then start small. When the firm implemented a new document automation system, Kamra invited 12 lawyers. e 10 who showed up quickly discovered that they could cre- ate first dras of documents in seconds as opposed to taking much longer by starting from scratch or seeking out precedents. When the group asked for a second session, Kamra told them to use the interim to au- tomate a document from beginning to end and then bring it to the next session. "I also told them to think hard about how to lever- age the tech by putting it to practical use on a file or in court," he says. "Proper training goes beyond attending law and just taking a tech course." On the development side, Kamra rec- ommends "starting from small and learn- ing from your mistakes." Before develop- ing the firm's Canadian Parker chatbot with his team, he engaged with the Austra- lian group which initiated the technology. "We looked at the underlying technolo- gy, picked elements that worked for Cana- da," he says. "Because legal technology has limits and won't work in every situation, particularly when you add complicating factors like jurisdictional differences and varying practice approaches, it's very hard to come up with a single solution that suits everyone." Law firms should be careful, Kamra adds, not to rely solely on their IT depart- ments to build the required technology. "It helps to have an intermediary with knowl- edge management expertise who can bridge the factors that make sense for the process earlier generations of machine learning soware required humans to predict the variability of documents and guidelines to identify particular clauses. ey worked well for highly similar documents or sim- ple provisions, such as those identifying the law governing the contract, but proved inconsistent in dealing with a wide range of agreements. Kira isn't the only game in town when it comes to contract analytics. Law Geex, Beagle, oughtRiver and Legal Robot are among its competitors. Marko Trivun, a senior associate at To- rys LLP in Toronto who focuses on the due diligence aspect of M&A, has been us- ing Kira's contract analysis soware since 2015. He says that the soware is changing the quality of his work in a positive way. "Kira takes the drudgery and monotony out of document review and allows law- yers to focus more on the legal skills they learned in law school in order to find the stuff that really matters," he says. ose concerned that AI will result in lost jobs will be relieved to learn, however, that Kira doesn't replace legally trained hu- man eyes. "With the drudgery out of the way, you end up with more energy and time doing the things for which you went to law school," Trivun says. "ings you might not have caught are more likely to come to your attention." Having the technology, then, is all well and good. Using it optimally, or at least be- ing prepared to use it, is another. e key to successful training, says Nor- ton Rose Fullbright's Kamra, is to get a buy- and the technical requirements that have to be met." At Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, re- sponsibility for new legal technologies falls to the practice innovation team, which includes the knowledge management and pricing teams, data and analytics expertise, and former practising lawyers who help identify use cases specific to a practice. "is team investigates and consid- ers practice-facing legal technologies and tracks what is happening in the market," says Carla Swansburg who, until recently, was chief officer, practice innovation, pric- ing and knowledge at Blakes. "In conjunc- tion with Firm leadership and IT among others, the team identifies technologies that respond to a real use case." e deployment of these tools is a long process that requires a "high touch," as Swansburg calls it. "We engage a group of lawyers and staff at the pilot stage and try and use real-life business issues, employing cases for testing the products to demon- strate value," she says. "Once we decide to license or purchase a tool, we identify po- tential champions — people who will be open-minded and who we believe will see real value by incorporating the technology into their practice." While it takes a lot of "showing" and hands-on work to deploy these tools, the process speeds up once a group of lawyers is using something and seeing its worth. "Our professional training staff work with the practice innovation team, which helps the training synergy," Swansburg says. It also helps to engage with clients. "Our clients are oen our best champions for change and we can use client value propo- sitions as a hook for more reluctant law- yers," Swansburg says. "We also find that working at the practice group level helps, because you can more clearly articulate the value of tools when you can demonstrate how they work within the lawyers' own practice area." McCarthy Tétrault's Peters says inte- grating legal tech is a change management issue that involves training, communica- tion and measurement. "e challenge is to ensure that the technology has been prop- erly implemented and that people are actu- ally using it," he says. McCarthy Tétrault's leans to a "project- by-project" approach that involves what Pe- MARKO TRIVUN TORYS LLP "Kira takes the drudgery and monotony out of document review and allows lawyers to focus more on the legal skills they learned in law school in order to find the stuff that really matters."

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