Looking ahead

A lawyer speaking recently on the future of law at Harvard with leading business and legal thinkers observed that the legal profession has proved uniquely impervious to change (“At Harvard Law, Talk of Disruptive Innovation”). Will that change? If your whole life is recorded, as is looking increasingly likely, perhaps all you will ever need to resolve a legal dispute is a search tool capable of working across multiple media formats, a screen for looking at the results, and someone with experience helping with your analysis.

Perhaps we are already there. The Irish High Court in the first ruling of its kind in Europe has approved the use of predictive coding (a form of artificial intelligence) in the document disclosure process ( Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Ltd & ors v Quinn & ors [2015] IEHC 175). The judge stated that in the disclosure of large data sets, technology assisted review