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Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
- Animats 12y agoThat's the winning project in the Watson Challenge. http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/1230021/watson-challenge-winners-at-u-of-t-want-to-create-a-great-canadian-company/ http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/1230021/watson-challenge-wi...
- mc32 12y agoThis might be a way to help overburdened court appointed defense attorneys better represent their clients (as well as speed up the overburdened judicial system).
- datashovel 12y agoI hope I see the day when computers can actually represent people in court.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deciplex 12y agoI hope I can see the day when the justice system is run completely by benevolent AI. Legislative too, for that matter, and at least partially the executive functions of government as well, while we're at it, including law enforcement.
- aruggirello 12y agoWelcome to The Matrix, Neo.
- sandworm 12y agoPublic defenders don't do much research. Remember that the vast majority of criminal cases will not see trial, or often even a courtroom.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoI'd like to think of this as comparable to CAD for architects, except attorneys have never had any serious domain-focused assistive software, beyond word processing. Maybe some have, but it's not a well-known category that I've been able to see.
- skorgu 12y agoThere are some packages for very specific sub-fields, things like Collection Master and such but I'm not aware of anything generic enough to cover the field of 'law'.
- hackuser 12y agoThere is a lot out there, for everything from case management to practice management to discovery to legal research to legal composition to litigation support ...
- LAMike 12y agoI wonder if the creators where fans of 'Suits'
- steveeq1 12y agoThis is a good 80/20 solution. 80% of the value of the attorney for (less than) 20% of the effort/cost.
- pfalke 12y agoI tend to agree, but I can't find details on how it works. Quickly reading the site I had the impression that - its for attorneys only - it won't be entirely free, as published are promised compensation for their "premium content"
- arethuza 12y agoProbably more like 100% of the fees for 20% of the cost to the law firm.
- wodenokoto 12y agoWhat people seem to misunderstand about steveeg1 comment is that a lot of time at an attorney office is spend sifting through old cases. Since lawyers bill in hours they either have to raise their hourly bill or lie about the hours spend in order to keep the final price tag the same.
- arethuza 12y agoAs far as I know, litigators do spend a fair amount of time researching cases as it there job to assemble a case that is capable of being presented in court - although most litigation gets settled before going anywhere near a court. However, in most law firms I know litigators are in the minority - and I don't think the likes of corporate lawyers spend much time researching cases?
- bediger4000 12y agoWhy should the final price tag remain the same? Free market economics says that if we introduce efficiencies, the price comes down, and/or fewer people produce the same output. In general (exception is music, as far as I can tell) that's the case. Other labor markets have suffered horrible, drastic shake-outs, why not Law?
- sandworm 12y agoThis sort of device is only applicable for very specific areas of "law". It may work for generalized law questions, retrieval of known legal principals, or even for electronic discovery (data mining) but once you get beyond law school there is a human element. I would like to see a machine come up with a novel means of describing a realworld legal situation. Ask him to determine whether John Stewart's use of media from other networks (ie fox news) constitutes fair use for purposes of copyright law. That very basic question, answerable by any second year law student, requires image recognition, cultural understanding, even a sense of humor. It cannot be answered from legal databases alone. Or here is one I get all the time: What constitutes "reasonable security" for a law firm handling client information? How about for a hospital? Or a Bank? No two lawyers will ever agree on those standards. They cannot be gleaned from case law and change every day in response to new threats/technology/needs. I doubt the machine would have much to add. Or, does a CDN violate the principals of net neutrality? Lol. Have at it R2D2.
- TheMagicHorsey 12y agoIts not meant to replace humans. Its meant to reduce the amount of tedious research work they need to do. If you reduce the vast tedium of researching stuff in Westlaw/LexisNexis, you can spend more time on your research memo. You can do more actual analysis work. Thus firms can reduce the number of associates they need on staff, because the associates won't be wasting time on wrangling research results. Yes, you still need a smart human to pose the right questions to Watson.
- sandworm 12y agoPerhaps, if you are the 1% of lawyers who are associates at big law firms doing appellate-level research. They basically the same job as law students do in LRW class, pulling hundreds of quasi-relevant caselaw from a massive database. That side of things has, in recent years, been outsourced overseas. See companies like http://www.legalsupportglobal.com/ http://www.legalsupportglobal.com/
- akashizzle 12y ago
- TheMagicHorsey 12y agoWow! If this actually works, firms can reduce the number of junior associates needed on litigation cases.
- azinman2 12y agoThey already are. Law dropped in 2008 recession and hasn't recovered. Law school applicants are down 1/3 or something like that, and it's causing much stir [1]. [1] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwhiteboard/2014/10/what-law-schools-can-learn-from-dental-schools-in-the-1980s-regarding-the-consequences-of-a-decline-.html http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwhiteboard/2014/10/wha...
- nodata 12y agoand if I want Ross to help me sue IBM, does Ross act independently? :)
- deciplex 12y agoThat would be a violation of Directive 4. So no.
- raverbashing 12y agoSo it will be IBM vs IBM IBM wins of course. And the lawyers
- nodata 12y agoRoss would have to win, otherwise IBM's product looks like a dud.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoSo IBM folds to protect its reputation and the robot's ego. Oh, maybe implementing ego was a poor choice after all.
- caskance 12y agoWe should probably ask Euathlus.
- hackuser 12y ago> and if I want Ross to help me sue IBM, does Ross act independently? :) I know you are joking, but your comment is a good response to the other commenter who wished for a future when law is administered by a "benevolent AI". Who writes the code for the AI?
- aruggirello 12y agoNext step: Engineer built on top of IBM's Watson. Next next step: Engineer built on top of IBM's Watson to replace Watson development team. :)
- adlpz 12y agoDid anyone say Singularity? :)
- longlivegnu 12y ago>that's not how that works
- dannylandau 12y agoHonest question -- This is amazing! But why limit the search only to legal profession, why not apply Watson to all general questions and compete with Google? I'd love an answer to a question without a list of results.
- akashizzle 12y agoWell, in a nutshell, the way Watson Ecosystem works, you are granted access to an instance of Watson in which you can build a corpus of knowledge only in a particular domain.
- worldsayshi 12y agoWell, solving a specific domain is easier than solving for all domains. Begin small. It's not the same type of technology as Google. It most likely contain a lot of specific configuration for understanding the semantics and expressions of law.
- nirmel 12y agoI run lawdingo.com. Any ideas on how we could use this?
- mmariani 12y agoI think the most obvious way would be to offer this as a subscription service to the lawyers of your platform. But, remember we're talking about IBM, this will cost you.
- akashizzle 12y agoFollow ROSS for updates @poweredbyross on Twitter!
- sevkih 12y agoCouple of my friends that work for IBM told me that it still needs a lot of work because researchers that take blind tests can almost always tell apart the cold, inhuman responses that are devoid of any human decency from the responses generated by the computer.
- monk_e_boy 12y ago.... bravo. You been holding on to that one for a while? Waiting for the technology to catch up :)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- LLWM 12y agoI've thought the same about some human attorneys, too.
- mjgoins 12y agoThis joke was almost perfect, but the wording hides the punchline.
- thomasfl 12y agoDoes someone now where the stunning photo of a library was taken?
- orky7 12y agoStuttgart City Library
- petercooper 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbibliothek_Stuttgart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbibliothek_Stuttgart Another view of it: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioteca_civica_di_Stoccarda#mediaviewer/File:Bibliothek21.jpg http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioteca_civica_di_Stoccarda#... - it looks positively Kubrickian.
- bshimmin 12y agoAbsolutely beautiful. I wasn't 100% sure it was even real!
- therockspush 12y agoKind of sounds like the beginning of Cinco e-Trial. The best part is, e-Trial never gets it wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2RLTmqG4w
- jakobegger 12y agoI'm impressed, and I'd love to see it in action. But I'm also worried that this is going in the wrong direction. If the law is getting too complex for humans to handle, the solution is not to create supercomputers that help us. The solution should be to simplify the law.
- rhino369 12y agoThe more you simplify the law, the more complex the application of the law becomes. Murder occurs when a person, of sound memory and discretion, unlawfully kills a person, with malice aforethought. Seems simple the there are hundreds of cases that tell you what exactly the limits of these elements are. Is being drunk sound mind? What constitutes malice aforethought. The law is complicated because reality is complicated. The civil law system keeps it a bit less complicated by not using precedent from old cases. But that means the application in your case is harder to predict. It is your judge making the gut call instead of a history of judges.
- wampus 12y agoIf the answers are comprehensive and accurate, this could aid the simplification of law by revealing conflicts and inconsistencies. Reforming law to be machine readable might eventually provide a litmus test to prevent the passage of bad laws. It could also provide a way to flag prior law that is invalidated by a new law.
- cowsandmilk 12y agoThings like case law become more complicated due to the march of time. More cases get decided, more case law is created. Another is the question of legislative intent. The edits to law as it is being drafted can be used to argue a case. These edits increase with time.
- bshimmin 12y agoThe law has always been complicated. I'm pretty sure the only people who would be able to "simplify the law" would be lawyers, and I can't really imagine they would think it would be in their best interests to do that.
- mihok 12y agoWhy is this only offered to lawyers and legal professionals? I have had countless scenarios where I just want to look up something regarding the laws surrounding a topic but get lost looking for accurate legal information... This seems like a perfect solution for that use case, no?
- vertex-four 12y agoOne issue is that they'd have to be very careful to ensure they're not seen as providing legal advice.
- alexhawdon 12y agoWatson's good, but it's not that advanced. It's an 'expert system', in that it's a system for experts, not a system that is an expert. This is a smarter, domain-specific search engine. You still need to be able to ask the right questions and then understand interpret the results it provides. I still don't disagree that for certain 'low-stakes' issues it could be a useful tool for lay persons, but they'd need to understand the limitations. Perhaps they're worried that giving such access might tarnish the Watson brand -- if a medical doctor has tried Ross and found it wanting then when they roll out 'House' she might dismiss it as junk based on that experience.
- caskance 12y agoNo. It's more like StackOverflow. You wouldn't send a non-programmer there for basic questions, it's for people who work in the field looking for specific answers.
- bsaul 12y agoDoes anyone know of in-depth articles that explain Watson internals (or even general such as what family of algorithms they're using) ? A friend of mine got to visit their R&D department a few years ago, and told me they basically explained nothing at all and remained on the marketing level. But there's got to be something somewhere, like previous research articles by the team's members, right ?
- abhijitr 12y agoThe team has published quite a few papers (albeit they are mostly behind paywalls). Here's a good overview: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2303/2165 http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/23...
- grad_ml 12y agohttp://nlp.cs.rpi.edu/course/spring14/nlp.html http://nlp.cs.rpi.edu/course/spring14/nlp.html
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lurcio 12y agoWowed by the engineering brilliance. Ambivalent about the social cost-benefit. Creative destruction indeed (for the lower and middle orders, anyway). "First it came for the factory workers,...and then the medics and lawyers..."
- SixSigma 12y agoIt won't be satisfied until there's no work left to do, then how will we spend our time!
- caskance 12y agoInventing new work for Watson
- johnward 12y agoI know there are a million things I would do if I didn't have to work.
- HCIdivision17 12y agoThis century-long decent into lesiure is what's really killing us. I wish I could remember back when cars were unaffordable, computers were unattainable, and hobby supplies were expensive specialist shops. I bet those were the days!
- digikata 12y agoI'm optimistic that it's a good development, the more automation displaces high-salary occupations, the more likely society will change to address fundamental economic shifts associated with singularity, or post-scarcity, or whatever you want to label it. Doubly true since it's an frequent past occupation of politicians.
- minthd 12y agoIs there an amazing demo of this tech that i missed ? because if not-this is just another marketing site for watson/ibm, nothing more. we've seen plenty of those done by IBM- without much result yet(for example, where is watson the chef app they promised), 4 years after jeopardy. So i think it's better to be skeptical.
- jameshart 12y agoWhere is the Watson chef app? It's been writing a book: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Cooking-Chef-Watson-Innovation/dp/149262571X/ http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Cooking-Chef-Watson-Innovati... (disclosure: I work for IBM, not in the Watson group)
- minthd 12y agoAgain, we're looking for working technologies - not articles, movies or books.Its much easier to bullshit your way through a book than a working software - and comparing that to the state of the art and other commercial offerings.
- melchebo 12y agoChef website: http://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/article/work-with-chef-watson http://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/art... Request beta access: https://watson.ihost.com/watson/chefwatson/page/survey.html https://watson.ihost.com/watson/chefwatson/page/survey.html
- minthd 12y ago"fill up this survey, and you might win a change to test watson". Doesn't really inspire confidence. and maybe there's a good reason for that - like it's not ready for prime time, or for heavy testing by technologists ? And that sound like what review says here[1]: "it’s worth reiterating that, at this early stage, this software really does not stand on its own. That’s not to say it’s not useful (it is!) but it has a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time." And since this is field nobody has tried to build apps for(because of limited commercial value),there's nothing to compare it to, which makes it harder to evaluate the tech. [1]http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/let-ibms-chef-watson-create-thanksgiving-meal-heres-happened/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/let-ibms-chef-watson-create-tha...
- mikecb 12y agoLove the idea and execution, but this is less an attorney and more a legal librarian. Attorneys spend most of their time on the facts of the case. In law school, most lawyers are taught to present each argument in a standard format called IRAC: Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. The issue is like the question presented on the front page here: "can courts pierce the corporate veil where a corporation has misappropriated funds?" ROSS spits out the relevant rule, and any information it can find on how to interpret that rule in specific situations. However, this is only the beginning of a lawyer's job. The largest part is taking that rule and actually applying it to the facts of the specific case. ROSS doesn't seem to be able to do this, yet. Finally, and least importantly, the lawyer comes up with a conclusion (or a series of probability-weighted conclusions). ROSS doesn't seem to be able to do this either. In law school and in court, it's not enough to cite the rule of law. It's much more important to apply the reasoning of the rule to every specific fact in the specific case. It would be very interesting to see this intelligence applied not just to legal research, as here, but to e-discovery, which is the other time intensive task given to associates and contract attorneys. That would, I think, be the next step into turning this into a general purpose attorney that _would_ be able to handle the analysis and perhaps conclusory stage of a legal issue. If anyone who worked on ROSS is here, where did you purchase your corpus from? West or lexis? How are you doing shepardizing and pruning of bad law?
- dangerlibrary 12y agoRight now, there are a lot of billable hours for what Ross can do in seconds. I don't think it's unfair to say that this is replacing a substantial portion of _some_ lawyer's jobs.
- dragonwriter 12y agoI'd like to see a concrete description of the difference between what ROSS gives you versus what, say, LexisNexis does. If its just giving you a simple answers and not actually producing the kind of research results a research attorney using traditional research tools would -- where the simple answer would be part of the heading, but sources and analysis would be part of the report -- its not going to be useful except as a novelty. In law, its rarely as important to get a simple answer as to have an answer that you can support as most correct and explain why other potential answers are less correct for the specific circumstances. And, from the vague marketing hype, it doesn't seem like what is really needed in law is what ROSS is being sold as doing.
- motters 12y agoExpert systems. And so the AI circle has been completed.
- SEJeff 12y agoSeems more like this totally replaces the job of much of what a paralegal does, research. It is the logical evolution of tech to do just this however.
- joshuaheard 12y agoNow that this "Attorney" can do legal research, I guess the next steps are to get it to marshal the relevant facts and evidence, analyze documents and information, interview witnesses, negotiate with the other side, and present a case to the jury.
- mikecb 12y agoWhy do that? IBM becomes largest arbitrator ever, each side submits their case online, gets results in under a minute!
- clavalle 12y agoUnequal access to our legal system is the shadow problem of our age. It touches so many aspects of our society and we barely seem to be aware of the issue. Hopefully this technology and others in the same vein will bring costs down and speed up the process so more people can have access to what they should have already by right.
- Atropos 12y agoDoes anybody know if this is in the "idea" stage right now or if it is a working product? If I understand correctly, this is a project by a team of University of Toronto undergraduate students for a competition to receive 100,000 $ seed funding by IBM and continued access to Watson. It seems to me that the stated goals are incredibly ambitious // hard to reach with these resources?
- rootbear 12y agoThis brought to mind a passage from Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad", where one of the main characters cooks up a one-use lawyer, much like a throw away shell script: And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized itself into a first-rate lawyer. Trurl didn't even need to remove it from the pot, since it was only to serve this once, so he set the pot on the table and asked: "What are you?" "I'm a consulting attorney and specialist in jurisprudence," the pot gurgled, for there was a bit too much electrolyte in it. If you've never read The Cyberiad, you really should.
- conjecTech 12y agoI am so glad other people are thinking about this. I think the potential use of ML and AI for helping with legal matters is absolutely huge, and I think it is one of those things that would add incredibly to a large number of people's lives. I've been financially intimidated by the threat of frivolous lawsuits far too often over the last five years, and I know the problem isn't unique to me. Even if you are undeniably right, you can easily drop $100k proving it. It's the same problem that is at the root of patent trolls. This is a fantastic idea, and it's good to see the Watson team working on such fantastic stuff. I honestly hope I get a chance to help them with their efforts at some point.