The article mentions some interesting things, but I have a few quibbles:<p>> But even with today’s modern communication tools, both customer experience and lawyer workflow have remained stagnant.<p>At a large firm, legal practice is unrecognizable compared to even 10-15 years ago. Everything is electronic: filing and docketing, document collection/scanning/OCR, legal research, document management (DMS + version control). Everyone communicates almost exclusively via e-mail, and remote work facilities are ubiquitous.<p>To the extent that technology is available that's not getting adopted, it's because it's not good enough. Predictive coding can be very helpful, but it also has a fixed setup and training overhead that makes it less efficient for smaller matters. That's why arguably the biggest shift in discovery in the last 15 years hasn't been to automating it, but outsourcing it to contract lawyers.<p>In the area of research, Westlaw and Lexis still rule because of their completeness and accuracy. If I need a copy of some statute enacted in 1873 I can not only find it, but I can get original scans so I can verify the text is free of OCR errors.<p>Moreover, things that are easy on the rest of the web are not easy when it comes to legal (or scientific) research. PageRank, for example, works great when everyone searching for "skiing near Tahoe" is looking for the same popular pages. But when you're doing legal research, a lower-court case that directly addresses your issue but isn't widely cited is much more valuable than a highly-cited Supreme Court case that doesn't address your issue. And computers still don't really understand either what issue you're looking for or what issue a case is about. So ancient technology (search for this word near that word) still rules the day.<p>> There are good reasons for this, as law firms tend to be cost agonistic (since they pass costs directly to their client)<p>This is oft-stated, but economically fallacious. Price is a function of supply and demand. The client cares about total cost for a particular legal service; she doesn't care about how that cost is broken down. If the client's budget for a matter is $300,000, every dollar that goes to costs is a dollar that doesn't go to the law firm. This is true even if you're billing by the hour, because in the long run, a firm will raise rates until hours x rate = client budget.
Four Areas of Legal Ripe for <i>Automation</i><p>Automating these aspects of legal practice wouldn't disrupt the way that industry functions. It would just make a lot of paralegals and young lawyers obsolete (and make legal services a lot cheaper).
I currently write software for an e-discovery company. Most tasks that our software is expected to be able to perform are simple-sounding tasks, at first glance, such as ...<p>1. extracting documents from within other documents (attachments out of an email, files out of a zip, embedded excels out of a word doc, images out of a powerpoint, etc)<p>2. convert all said documents to some kind of standard media format so that the native viewing applications are not needed (all said document types to png, or pdf, or tif)<p>3. allow full-text searching across all electronic files<p>With these kinds of tasks available as an automated feature, the real product would just allow a bunch of attorneys to review the documents and apply tags or labels to them. Once they've gone through all the documents, there is generally an output from the system that summarizes their work and provides the relevant documents, notes, etc.<p>Over the years of writing this kind of software, we've encountered a never-ending amount of complicates with file types, feature requests, etc. The real complexities with this kind of software is making your software work for a large number of customers. Every customer probably has a different idea about what they want this kind of tool to do for them.
This paralegal I know told me 2 years ago "I wish someone would automate discovery because it sucks right now". I wish I knew absolutely anything about it.
I hear <a href="http://thoughtly.co" rel="nofollow">http://thoughtly.co</a> moved into e-discovery for visualization and summarization. Are there any other machine learning startups in the space right now?
I'd be interested in seeing an IDE for contract drafting. Or something like an Excel mapper that can show me how all the provisions and definitions in a contract are interrelated.
eDiscovery is <i>not</i> ripe for disruption. That ship has sailed.<p>eDiscovery has largely been solved for most corporate environments. There are tools to collect data in a defensible manner, to "process" (i.e., index) it, and to review it. There are even some products that aggregate these functions together, however, it must be well-noted that each of these functions has a different user/customer and occurs at a different timeframe in the discovery process.<p>Many of the dominant tools do have their warts. But the money that was once in this space--the eDiscovery collection product I wrote sold for a couple million to its first customer--is no longer there. Prices have dropped dramatically and its now a commoditized market. So you'd have to work very hard for very little gain to displace any of the dominant players.<p>Note that TFA was written by investors in a new eDiscovery startup and TFA seems mostly like latent marketing for them. I don't know anything about them--good luck and all that--but I'm very familiar with the space and I don't envy them.
It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.
PlainSite (<a href="http://www.plainsite.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.plainsite.org</a>), which I run, is tackling the research end of things.
Still seems quite a challenging disruption here. For one, you'd need to know some aspect of the lawyer's daily job and two you'd have to know how to sell to lawyers. The thing that scares me most is that these people also hold a trigger to suing the crap out of you because they can. It's exciting and scary at the same time.