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20 May 2016 / Karl Chapman
Issue: 7699 / Categories: Features , Profession , Technology
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Virtual reality

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Karl Chapman tracks the march of virtual assistants

The technological revolution we’re living through will affect all of us and impact all sectors of the economy and society. Its language includes many buzz words and phrases: artificial intelligence; machine-learning; big data; the internet of things; smart assistants; deep automation; blockchains; computational law; the cloud.

We see a rapidly growing desire among Riverview Law customers to understand how this will impact business models generally and their organisation, their function, and their people specifically. Twenty-six years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web there is a realisation that none of us are immune from the exponential impact of Moore’s law. A law that has had (and will have) many consequences, including IBM Watson (a computer) beating the two all-time (human) champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! and Google AlphaGo beating the Go world champion.

Law is definitely not immune from this revolution and one of the leading change agents in the legal market will be digital/virtual assistants. Tools that when deployed to customers change their

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