Meet ROSS, The World’s First AI Lawyer

It can do everything but fetch you coffee.

 
Meet ROSS, The World’s First AI Lawyer

American law firm BakerHostetler has hired ROSS, a robot lawyer, to assist in bankruptcy cases. ROSS, who is powered by IBM’s Watson technology, will serve as a legal researcher for the firm.  Legal researcher jobs are typically filled by fresh law school graduates embarking upon their careers.

“ROSS surfaces relevant passages of law and then allows lawyers to interact with them. Lawyers can either enforce ROSS’s hypothesis or get it to question its hypothesis,” Andrew Arruda, chief executive of ROSS Intelligence, told The Washington Post. “Until now, lawyers have been using static pieces of software to navigate the law, which are limited and put hours of information retrieval tasks on a lawyer’s plate."

About 80% of Americans who require a lawyer simply can't afford one, Arruda says, despite the country having a surplus of attorneys. So ‘employing’ AI lawyers like ROSS could allow law firms to charge lower fees since they wouldn't be paying anything. (Because what could you pay an AI? A paintjob?)

Thus, all law firms could use the power of AI for the purpose of Justice.

Not to mention, ROSS could come in pretty handy in court battles. As an AI built by a neutral third party, he’s pretty much programmed to be impartial, which means both sides could use him to look up relevant legal details and rulings of a long-buried case from 50 years ago. Now this doesn’t mean you don’t do your homework, of course.

What’s even more impressive is that ROSS doesn’t communicate in machine-lingo or computer-speak, but in everyday English. The challenge in building ROSS, Arruda says, was finding a way to make it as intuitive as an actual colleague. That meant programming it to respond to people's normal manner of speaking, not just keyword-loaded fragments.

You know what that reminds me of? JARVIS. Tony Stark’s trusty AI who kinda-sorta became…

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/1d3c1752a37370f21907c51fa629e4ce39f66d09/c=480-0-1151-894&r=537&c=0-0-534-712/local/-/media/2015/04/30/USATODAY/USATODAY/635659960198142326-XXX-AVENGERS-AGE-ULTRON-MOV-JY-5784-72497076.JPG

Image from: USA Today

Take a look at ROSS, now.

ROSS stems from research conducted in 2014 at the University of Toronto. A year later, the AI moved to Palo Alto, California and in just ten months of ROSS learning bankruptcy law, it received a job offer at Baker & Hostetler (stock image used) 

Image from: Mail Online

Look somewhat… related?

Wow. It really is the future. JARVIS is real, I can  WhatsApp from space, and computers weigh less than I do. What’s next?

I call time-travel.


Tags : ROSS, Artificial Intelligence, AI Lawyer

 
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