We Have a Robot Lawyer Now

ROSS is an artificial intelligence that’s capable of performing the legal research previously performed by new lawyers.

Today in “jobs that have been replaced by robots,” we have ROSS, the robot lawyer:

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 careers.

That’s from the Washington Post, which interviewed ROSS Intelligence co-founder and CEO Andrew Arruda to learn that “With ROSS, lawyers can focus on advocating for their client and being creative rather than spending hours swimming though hundreds of links, reading through hundreds of pages of cases looking for the passages of law they need to do their job.”

What about the non-robot, human lawyers who used to do that job? Arruda told Tech Insider that ROSS can do it better and faster:

“The law is the same for both parties,” Arruda says. “No matter if you have 20 associates doing research on a case, or just one equipped with ROSS, the relevant passages will be found for you.”

The official ROSS press release even states that ROSS has the capacity to learn:

The ROSS platform is built upon Watson, IBM’s cognitive computer. With the support of Watson’s cognitive computing and natural language processing capabilities, lawyers ask ROSS their research question in natural language, as they would a person, then ROSS reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based candidate answers. ROSS also monitors the law around the clock to notify users of new court decisions that can affect a case. The program continually learns from the lawyers who use it to bring back better results each time.

So we have ROSS, the legal robot who can do the work of at least 20 entry-level lawyers, and we learned last week about Jill, the teaching robot that can do the work of a graduate TA while tricking 300 students into thinking she’s human.

A “More Jobs Are Being Performed By Robots and We Don’t Even Realize It” Question of the Day

All we need now is a movie where they fall in love—and jobs for the people they replace.

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