This position paper describes how Cuatrecasas, as a leader and innovative Law Firm in Spain, understands Artificial Intelligence, and how it will impact on and disrupt its current business. In this workshop, Cuatrecasas will share the strategy, their vision and some of the most relevant projects and IT initiatives related to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing from a generic abroad spectrum solution to much more specific ad-hoc solutions.
Cuatrecasas is a law firm present in 12 countries with a strong focus on Spain, Portugal and Latin America. It represents companies that are leaders in their sectors, advising them on their investments in the major markets. Some relevant information about Cuatrecasas is: optimizing efficiency of resources and client proximity, and benefiting from the different time zones. Our international desks (covering Latin America, Asia, France, Germanic countries and the Middle East) and over 20 countryspecific groups guarantee the comprehensive approach of our legal advice from Spain and Portugal. – Services and specialty areas. Cuatrecasas advises on all areas of business law, applying a sectoral approach and covering all types of business. Our law firm also combines maximum technical expertise with business vision to provide responsible and innovative legal advice for practical solutions.
Figure 1 shows the main specialty areas in Cuatrecasas. – Awards. Figure 2 depicts some of the most relevant awards that Cuatrecasas has won regarding innovation and leadership in the main areas of Law.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking the legal world by storm and lawyers are embracing the change, despite their traditional resistance to technology. In today’s world, data is growing explosively. While that massive store of data contains correspondingly voluminous and useful information–especially for the practice of law–it also takes massive time to analyse. Thankfully, computers are evolving just as quickly as the data boom, and theyre here to save us from ourselves. These programs can quickly learn to complete data-intensive tasks that were previously relegated to bored and weary humans. By recognizing patterns in the relationships between words or data points, computers learn how to identify relevant information, recognize mistakes, and spot inconsistencies–all faster, and usually better, than humans do.
The primary areas where AI is being applied in the law, so far, include the following broad categories: – review of documents for discoverable or otherwise relevant information, generally referred to as technology-assisted review (TAR) – legal research through automated searches of a universe of case law and statutes – contract and legal document analysis – proofreading, error correction, and document organization
The benefits provided by the application of AI in the law firms field are: – AI Saves Time – AI Allows Earlier (and more accurate) Risk Assessment – AI Produces Higher-Quality Work – AI Improves Organizational and Logical Structure – AI Enhances Creative Analysis and Identification of Persuasive Precedents – AI Reduces Attorney Stress and Frustration – AI Improves Client Relations
All these benefits are interrelated, with each type of benefit leading to and fostering additional benefits. That interrelationship also harnesses the power of momentum. Just as an early mistake can rapidly spiral into more (and more serious) later mistakes, high-quality work also builds on itself and supports the production of more good quality work.
In short, deploying an AI solution can create a positive momentum
throughout a law firm. As attorneys come to trust AI software, they can relax and
let the computers attend to the monotonous details. As a consequence, the AI
adoption is increasing, CBRE1 published a summary from a survey carried out
in London among 100 law firms [
A frequently expressed concern is that increased reliance on AI will lead to job cuts in the sector, particularly amongst junior lawyers and support roles. According to CBRE’s research, 45% of firms surveyed expect to see headcount fall at these levels. However, only 7% expect AI to lead to a reduction in headcount at a senior level. 3
Cuatrecasas has been actively following for many years, piloting and searching for applications of AI and Machine Learning (ML) within the firm. Currently our lines of work revolve around two large blocks / lines of generic work: the first focuses on the Automating Low Value Tasks and the second aimed at complementing and supporting the lawyer in the Resolution of Simple Legal Issues. All this plus a third line of Advanced Business Analytics incorporating predictive analytics into our production, commercial and compliance processes.
This current situation is part of a long history around AI and ML. It all started after the appearance in the press of IBM Watson in the Jeopardy contest in 2011 and materialized (after many efforts) in a workshop and a POC of possible IBM Watson applications in Cuatrecasas at the end of 2015. In this period, Cuatrecasas focused on analysing technology and the state of the art. After ruling out the approach proposed by IBM with Watson as expensive and slow, Cuatrecasas decided to evaluate and finally bet on other more affordable solutions. It was at the end of 2015 that SEMANTI-K was acquired, a solution from a small Spanish company named ISOCO specialized in technology based on Semantics and the recognition of natural language (NLP). ISOCO was lately acquired by Expert System and Cuatrecasas technologically decided to migrate to the Expert System’s product Cogito Discover 2.
In parallel and during the following years the IA and the ML has been consolidating within the legal sector and nice solutions have appeared, especially oriented to the Anglo-Saxon market (trained in English), focusing initially on the analysis and automatic classification of documents in the field of Due Diligence. In Cuatrecasas we decided to bet on Kira 3 (after evaluating many similar 1 CBRE Group, Inc. is the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. Home Page available at: https://www.cbre.co.uk/about-cbre/corporateinformation 2 https://www.expertsystem.com/products/text-analytics-software-cogito-discover/ 3 https://kirasystems.com/ solutions like eBrevia 4, RAVN 5 and later Luminance 6) to pilot and start training with documents in Spanish.
This line of solutions aimed at support in operations and document / contract review was complemented in 2017 with the Doxray 7 collaboration, a Dutch start-up that championed a general solution based on Deep Learning and that wanted to enter the legal sector for non-English speaking. Doxray, unlike the previous solutions, allows to customize and adapt the solution to specific use cases and on them we are continuously working creating ”specific products” for operations and recurring problems of our lawyers. On this platform we have created a solution for real estate transactions (massive analysis of real estate assets in transactions of purchase and sale of companies and / or assets, starting from the simple notes of the property registry but integrating with commercial register, cadastre, ...).
And also integrating the advances in training in the analysis of frequent contracts in due diligence of M & A, such as Lease Agreements and Distribution Contracts, where the simple notes associated with the properties usually appear or are also provided.
And many more things, we analyze and test the different cognitive service providers to integrate them in our projects / solutions, from the Cognitive Services of Azure, IBM Bluemix through the Google Cloud Platform or the SAP Hana Cloud Platform.
Currently, Cuatrecases has several initiatives and projects around these
technologies in the office, which we will explain and show in the workshop:
– Analysis of Simple Notes with Doxray (solution and case of success)
– Experiences and advances in Contract Review with KIRA and Luminance
– Automatic document classification
– Cuatrecasas WORD INTELLIGENCE as an integrating front-end tool and
facilitator of the lawyer’s work in the process of creating legal documents
– Use case of Cuatrecasas Labour Law within the LYNX H2020 project [
TUAL ATTORNEY 4 https://ebrevia.com/ 5 https://imanage.com/product/ravn/ 6 https://www.luminance.com/ 7 https://doxray.com/