Three recent reviews worth reading and all, by chance, available on the same day (October 6) have emphasised the importance of Artificial Intelligence in disrupting the business of law – a special report from the Financial Times; the recent Society of Computers and Law lecture by Richard Susskind (not  yet formally published); and a review by the BBC technology consultant, Rory Cellan Jones. The latter is particularly trenchant and opens with a quote from Google’s Sundar Pichai: ‘We’re moving from a mobile first to an AI-first world’.

Richard Susskind compared the current growth partnerships around AI by the big firms with his early work with Professor Phillip Clapper in seeking a guided pathway approach to dealing with issues relating to latent damage. This was, he says, but the beginning – though it is pretty precisely where the Rechtwijzer and following products like MyLawBC have got to right now. He argued that the ambit of price-sensitive work is much smaller than many argue and that, for this reason, the main legal firms were moving decisively into AI.

AI was also the theme of the FT’s special report on innovative lawyers. It argues that the legal profession is ‘ripe for disruption’ under the pressures of costs from clients and the big accounting firms ‘who have begun to offer legal services and use technology to do routine work’. Examples of responses from the legal profession are Pinsent Mason’s TermFrame  (work organisation) system, Linklaters’ Verify (regulatory checking) and Allen and Overy’s partnership with Deloitte, MarginMatrix (financial regulation) – under which ‘the time to draft a document will fall from three hours to three minutes’.

All this might seem a bit remote from the agency trying to give social security advice in a deeply depressed area miles from a capital city. But, the BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones links the advance of AI with the development of chatbots or virtual PAs such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant,  Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa. He notes that Samsung has just bought Viv, the company that created Siri and flogged it off to Apple. Samsung describes its latest acquisition as ‘a unique, open artificial intelligence platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into renowned applications and services’.  It is, of course, regrettable that exploding Samsung phones may slow down – though ultimately unlikely to stop – acceptance of this technology.

Much attention in the legal field has focused on IBM’s Watson and the potential legal applications to which it can be used. And there can be little doubt of its potential impact. But, the most interesting development for those concerned with legal services to those on low incomes perhaps comes from the combination of AI with chatbots. This is the radical impact of the well publicised work of James Browder, beginning with his DoNotPay bot. We are potentially talking here not of a specialist app but of a readily available facility to which you can switch as effortlessly as to Siri – ultimately incorporated perhaps with Siri and her companions; allowing you to ask a question in ordinary language; and get a reply. Imagine an integrated legal advice provision so that you could just ask about the law and get a reply sufficiently detailed to frame your future action. That would be exciting and the cocks would certainly crow over that. It might even be worth making a pitch for.