It’s extremely tedious to do legal research as the law is constantly changing and there are tons of precedent cases, and secondary sources that one must be familiar with in order to get the right answers. The research process takes precious man hours away from lawyers as they get bogged down searching through all the information available and trying to make sense of it. Clients also end up being billed hefty fees when their lawyers have to spend a lot of time sifting through all that information.
Lawyers can now leverage ROSS to do all their legal research at a fraction of the time and money. It is built on IBM Watson’s cognitive computer platform which provides lawyers with an instant answer with citations. It does not rely on keyword searches like many other legal research software in the market. Instead, it has a smart voice-activated interface which essentially functions as a legal assistant. It is legal research on steroids!
All one needs to do is ask ROSS a question:
ROSS, I’m working on a case now in which my client has been accused of engaging in wire fraud. Bring up all the past cases and judgments on wire fraud and tell me what I should look out for my client.
ROSS will be able to provide a highly relevant and coherent answer. The more you use ROSS, the smarter its AI gets and the more effective it becomes.
Applications of Cognitive Computing AI outside the Legal field
According to ROSS, the market size for legal research software is huge at about $8.4 billion per year, given the roughly 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S. and Canada.
It makes me wonder what similar research tools are available in the market. Imagine a ROSS equivalent that digests all the business research platforms such as the Harvard Business Review, EBSCO, Lexis-Nexis, Bloomberg, Economist Intelligence Unit and many others. Using cognitive computing AI to power a tool like this would be extremely powerful in terms of making sense of massive amounts of data to produce insights that have the potential to change the world.
