Washington D.C. – February 27, 2018 – The ultimate impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the business of law 93 Percent of Legal Professionals Think Artificial Intelligence Will Help or Create More Opportunity Within the Legal Industry, According to Consilio Surveyremains to be seen, but legal professionals are largely positive about how it will affect the industry and their day-to-day jobs. According to a survey conducted by Consilio, a global leader in eDiscovery, document review and legal consulting services, the majority of legal professionals (53 percent) believe AI will create more opportunity within the legal industry with another 40 percent saying it will help the industry.

AI has already improved code-based tasks like eDiscovery for some time through the form of technology-assisted review (TAR), but respondents believe that AI will soon begin impacting the industry in other ways. Outside of eDiscovery, legal professionals believe contract drafting and management will be the most heavily impacted legal task affected by AI (37 percent) followed by litigation analysis (32 percent), risk assessment (15 percent) and computational models predicting legal outcomes (15 percent).

When asked about the biggest positive impacts of AI on the legal industry, respondents agreed AI will enable lawyers to spend more time on higher level, strategic work (35 percent) and create cost efficiencies (28 percent). Survey results showed that respondents also believe the benefits of AI include more data and analytics, which will help create new legal innovations (20 percent) and code-based tasks like document review will be more efficiently completed (17 percent).

“Artificial intelligence is slowly integrating itself into every aspect of our lives and the legal industry is no exception,” said Amy Hinzmann, Managing Director at Consilio. “The results of this survey confirm the legal industry is preparing for and excited about how AI will impact their jobs. Improved processes, like those already seen in eDiscovery, will help speed up once tedious processes and give legal professionals time to focus more on the strategic aspects of their roles.”

The majority (62 percent) of legal professionals surveyed say AI is impacting their day-to-day jobs right now. However, almost all legal professionals surveyed (95 percent) expect AI to impact their day-to-day jobs in the next five years.

Additional survey findings showed that 29 percent of respondents think that loss of jobs will be the biggest negative impact of AI on the industry. In addition, 28 percent believe AI will create less opportunity for junior associates. Thirty-three percent of survey respondents said that AI will not negatively affect the industry at all.

Survey Methodology

The survey of 105 legal professionals from in-house law departments, law firms and government affiliated entities, was conducted by Consilio at the Legalweek conference held from January 30 – February 1, 2018.

About Consilio

Consilio is a global leader in eDiscovery, document review and legal consulting services. Consilio supports multinational law firms and corporations using innovative software, cost-effective managed services and deep legal and regulatory industry expertise. The company has extensive experience in litigation, HSR second requests, internal and regulatory investigations, eDiscovery, information governance and compliance, law department management, document review, contracts management and legal analytics. ISO 27001 certified, the company operates offices and data centers across Europe, Asia and North America. For more information, please visit www.consilio.com. 

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