Lexpert Magazine

LEXPERT MAGAZINE | JUNE 2016 75 BY GEORGE TAKACH TECHNOLOGY Advances in IT are revolutionizing every industry — including legal services Data-driven Legal IN A WORLD where information tech- nology is hugely disruptive in so many mar- kets, do you ever wonder what impact IT will have on the legal profession? (Is that nervous laughter I hear?) When I ask how the Internet, artificial intelligence, big data and other state-of-the- art IT developments will affect lawyers, I'm not asking an academic question. ere is virtually no sector of the economy that isn't being buffeted today by the harsh winds of IT-induced change. One major Canadian bank, for example, just announced that it is increasing its IT spend to $2.4 billion an- nually, and that in a decade it expects only 10 per cent of its business to be generated through its physical branches. Could it re- ally be that the business of banking will go through such a dramatic transformation … and lawyering will remain unchanged? Some in the legal profession argue that what they do is so reliant on human judg- ment that being replaced by IT would be unimaginable. I assume the world's best chess and GO players said the same, un- til IT systems recently beat human world champions in both pursuits. Clearly, put- ting one's head in the sand is no way to deal with the threat. Aer all, the IT threat is also a huge opportunity for those who think about IT proactively and with an open and creative mind. SHORT- AND LONG-TERM IMPACT We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technology — just as we under- estimate its long-term effects. So, it's prob- ably overblown to say that lawyers will be disintermediated by IT overnight; but on the other hand, certain paradigm shis are already crystallizing that will indeed have a pronounced impact on what lawyers do, and how they do it. Consider what is happening already in "save the company" litigation, high-stakes commercial negotia- tions, and "bet the company" M&A deals. If you deconstruct what goes on in a large, complex litigation file, you can break it down into two buckets of activity. Ad- vocacy in a courtroom, while a critical ele- ment, is really like the tip of the iceberg. Ly- ing beneath the water's surface is the mas- sive activity of "litigation support," a huge part of which is document review. Without good document review – now focused ever more closely on the parties' respective internal email traffic – the ad- vocacy piece simply cannot be done well. And IT is having a huge impact on docu- ment review. e raw, paper-based records (although more and more of them are origi- nally electronic) can be scanned, indexed, reviewed and more. Conclusions can be drawn, or at least working hypotheses generated — and very quickly, for way less money than by the traditional army of ju- niors at the law firm. And if human review is still found use- ful, those human eyes may well be in sub- urban offices half a world away, with the offshore activity buttressed and made ef- ficient and cost-effective through IT. (Oh, and down the hall from the document re- viewer, in the legal processor's outsourced facility in India or South Africa, is a young, US-trained paralegal preparing a first dra of a patent application for a senior intel- lectual property lawyer in Toronto, Palo Alto, New York or London). Welcome to leading-edge law practised in a 21st-centu- ry globalized IT environment. WORLDWIDE DELIVERY I recently had a negotiation across from an IT services supplier, where they were responding to my client's RFP. As usual, we had included a dra Master Services Agreement in the RFP, and the supplier had revised and marked up the MSA as part of its proposal. So there we were, nego- tiating their changes to the MSA. When we took a break, I chatted one-on- one with the lead lawyer for the supplier. I said to him I noticed there were quite a few typos in his handiwork, which was no big deal because we could catch them all, but I did inquire why he hadn't used his com- puter's spell-check feature. He looked at me and smiled. He said he wasn't the author of their changes to the MSA. He said it had been done by their of- fice in South Asia and that it only arrived in Toronto a few minutes before it had to be submitted as part of the proposal. Fact is, he was reading it for the first time that morning as we were negotiating it. is isn't meant as a criticism of the supplier — quite the contrary. Whether you're impressed or not by the supplier's global delivery model, this is leading-edge commercial lawyering in 2016. Docu- ments are craed by persons all around the world, with the supply chain being internationalized through ubiquitous IT and modern communications. GLOBAL SUPPORT FOR THE DEAL A similar trend is sweeping M&A block- busters. Sure, negotiations require an ex- PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK | COLUMNS |

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