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AI Case Study

BakerHostetler plans to improve research process efficiency by implementing the ROSS legal bot

BaskerHostetler has entered an agreement with ROSS Intelligence to use its AI chatbot platform, ROSS, to assist its bankruptcy team in research. Lawyers can query ROSS, which then searches through documents and provides relevant answers.

Industry

Professional Services

Legal

Project Overview

The Washington Post reports that "ROSS has joined the ranks of law firm BakerHostetler, which employs about 50 human lawyers just in its bankruptcy practice. The AI machine, powered by IBM’s Watson technology, will serve as a legal researcher for the firm. It will be responsible for sifting through thousands of legal documents to bolster the firm’s cases. These legal researcher jobs are typically filled by fresh-out-of-school lawyers early on in their career. ROSS surfaces relevant passages of law and then allows lawyers to interact with them. Lawyers can either enforce ROSS’s hypothesis or get it to question its hypothesis. The legal robot is accessed via computer and billed as a subscription service."

Reported Results

From the Ross Intelligence site, Blue Hill conducted a benchmark test for ROSS (not specific to BakerHostetler's use) in the context of bankruptcy law and found that "the ROSS tool provides significant, additive contributions to the effectiveness of legal researchers. These gains include between a 22.3% and 30.3% reduction in research time, stemming from substantial improvements in information retrieval."

Technology

The Washington Post reports: "The software allows the legal team to upvote and downvote excerpts based on the robot’s interpretation of the question. ROSS uses machine learning technology to fine tune its research methods." From Ross Intelligence's website: "ROSS's proprietary legal AI framework, Legal Cortex, combined with technologies such as IBM Watson's cognitive computing technology, ROSS uses Natural Language processing and machine learning capabilities to identify legal authorities relevant to particular questions. Users conduct searches by entering questions in plain language, rather than by complex search strings. ROSS’s cognitive computing and semantic analysis capabilities permit the tool to understand the intent of the question asked and identify answers “in context” within the searched authorities."

Function

Information Technology

Knowledge Management

Background

From The Washington Post: "Until now, lawyers have been using static pieces of software to navigate the law, which are limited and put hours of information retrieval tasks on a lawyer’s plate. ROSS’s hiring at BakerHostetler, a firm with 900 lawyers, represents a huge win for ROSS Intelligence in securing use of their software within a major player in the legal field."

Benefits

Data

Legal documents

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