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Can this software predict lawsuits?
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: January 20, 2017
A startup legal “artificial intelligence” company has rolled out a complex application that may be able to help companies, and their attorneys, predict future lawsuits against them.
The company cleverly calls itself “IntraSpection,” and uses an algorithm that may be able to detect problematic language in emails and other forms of company communication before that language leads to a lawsuit.
Note: I put the term “artificial intelligence (AI)” in quotations because I think that the current learning algorithms that are called “AI” fall far short of what I consider to be intelligence—a term that includes, among other aspects, intuition and emotion. But that’s a discussion for another day.
IntraSpection’s algorithm is currently limited to looking for potential employment law lawsuits, but the company said on its website that the platform is applicable to any area of law.
The basic idea behind the platform is to search through all company emails, looking for key words that could warn of a potential lawsuit. These key words, kept in a “library,” are culled from hundreds of actual federal lawsuits in the appropriate area of law. Continued use of the algorithm “trains” the system to be more useful for a particular user.
The program runs invisibly in the background, reading every company email and flagging “significant litigation risks.” These risks can then be assessed prospectively by an internal team, both flagging previously unknowable risks, and eliminating the need to search through an overwhelming number of emails to assess litigation risks.
Those risks are then communicated to a person, who goes through each flagged email to see if a real problem exists. That reader’s dashboard is simple, flexible, and utilitarian, visualizing the results utilizing spreadsheets, bar graphs, text highlighting, links to the actual emails, and other functions.
The flagged email can also be copied directly to litigation software, so I would also assume that it can be used retrospectively in litigation support, sorting through past company emails.
IntraSpection said that the platform gives companies the capability of conducting internal investigations, alerting a control group of potential actions, all within the frameworks of privilege and work-product.
Worth checking out. For a short demo of the IntraSpection platform, as well as a 30-day trial for qualifying companies, go to http://www.intraspexion.com.