Data’s power to transform legal work
There’s an opportunity for young lawyers who embrace analytics to ride the next wave of careers in the profession.
As an articling student at Ottawa-based KMH Lawyers, Peter Zachar sees applications for the use of data science almost daily in his work.
“At every step, I see ways that data science can provide insight into the kind of work that we’re doing,” says Zachar. “I see how it would streamline things and provide analytics virtually across the board in what I am doing.”
For example, he says data science is “perfectly suited” to looking at thousands of wills to see how they have been prepared and which ones led to litigation and what wording resulted in that litigation.
“It could be the same with factums — data science could be used to see what works, what doesn’t and what language was used that led to positive outcomes and what missed the mark,” he says.
Zachar’s keen interest in using data science in law grew after signing up for associate professor Wolfgang Alschner’s Data Science for Lawyers elective in his first year of law school at the University of Ottawa.
As someone who did graduate studies in neuroscience, Zachar had been drawn to applying scientific approaches to solving problems in the law.
“I become increasingly excited about the idea that essentially everything we deal with in the law is also data. In the past, data for me was spreadsheets with numbers, but Wolfgang’s course opened my eyes to the fact that words are data just as much as anything else,” he says.
In class, students analyzed various trade agreements and used data science to compare clauses in provisions across treaties Canada has with multiple countries.
“My group focused on e-commerce provisions in trade treaties. We looked at similarities and differences, and you can generate various measures of how similar they are. The take-home is that kind of approach saves a tonne of time. Instead of reading hundreds of treaties, we automated the process to give us initial insights and target future reading,” he says.
Professor Alschner is a faculty member of the Common Law Section and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa and heads the UOttawa Legal Technology Lab. In January, his course Microprogram in Law and Technology will be offered to students of law, lawyers in law firms, researchers or anyone looking to develop expertise in law and technology.
“The reason I’m teaching this course is that there are very few established lawyers who are also computer scientists or who are comfortable with technology. This is an opportunity for young people who are digital natives to make their mark on the legal profession,” he says.
Law student Nicolas Kasting wants to be one of the new generation of lawyers who understands how to leverage data analytics in his legal work.
“I’m hoping to be a litigator and do conflict resolution,” says Kasting, who has also taken Alschner’s course. “I think the place that technology can have an impact is in sifting through large amounts of documents quickly. It’s no secret there’s an access to justice issue in terms of being able to litigate things relatively quickly and relatively inexpensively.”
But getting access to the data and crunching it is only half of the equation.
“The analytics will show you certain patterns, but then you have to do proper legal analysis and make good legal conclusions,” says Kasting. “I think in the long term, it can certainly free up a lot of the more tedious work lawyers do and hopefully open the door to helping people who face immigration or family law services that are inaccessible to most people today.”
Alschner says many students take the course to see “what the hype is all about” and to alleviate any concerns about robots replacing lawyers in the future.
“They should see technology more as an opportunity and not a threat,” he says. “These types of tools can be used in legal practice and for startup ideas.
