Lawyers at Slaughter and May are teaching a computer program to take over their due diligence work on M&A deals.
The Magic Circle firm is collaborating with Luminance, a tech company backed by controversial Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's investment fund, to test the technology. It is built on Recursive Bayesian estimation, an algorithm which constantly calculates the probabilities of multiple scenarios, and which is already used in robotics to allow a robot to infer its position at any point.
At Slaughters, it means that lawyers served as human guinea pigs and "fed Luminance documents while we were performing DD". From those documents, "we taught it to identify various clauses", training Luminance to make the most probable human decisions on M&A due diligence. Emily Foges, Luminance's chief executive, said that "with Slaughter and May's help", it is designing a system "to understand how lawyers think". Opening up the alarming possibility of Dilbot 3000 living on a diet of sandwiches and black coffee for six years before getting depressed and moving in-house.
Foges denied that S&M lawyers were helping to make their peers obsolescent, claiming that, "highly-trained lawyers who would otherwise be scanning through thousands of pages of repetitive documents", would be freed to "spend more of their time analysing the findings and negotiating the terms of the deal". Surplus highly-trained lawyers and less highly-trained lawyers weren't mentioned, but perhaps they will be retained to check the robot's work, or replace its eye diodes.
Slaughter and May Senior Partner Steve Cooke said the legal due diligence process "is ripe for the revolution that Artificial Intelligence offers", while Lynch said he was "particularly pleased" to be collaborating with, "a law firm which leads the way when it comes to innovation and quality of service". The love-in has a history, with Slaughter and May acting for Lynch in 2011 on his notorious £7.1 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. HP decided the tech company was worthless, and is now suing Lynch for £5.1 billion with a trial set for 2018. So Slaughters should just double-check it's not being palmed off with a Tamagotchi taped to a calculator.
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The Magic Circle firm is collaborating with Luminance, a tech company backed by controversial Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's investment fund, to test the technology. It is built on Recursive Bayesian estimation, an algorithm which constantly calculates the probabilities of multiple scenarios, and which is already used in robotics to allow a robot to infer its position at any point.
At Slaughters, it means that lawyers served as human guinea pigs and "fed Luminance documents while we were performing DD". From those documents, "we taught it to identify various clauses", training Luminance to make the most probable human decisions on M&A due diligence. Emily Foges, Luminance's chief executive, said that "with Slaughter and May's help", it is designing a system "to understand how lawyers think". Opening up the alarming possibility of Dilbot 3000 living on a diet of sandwiches and black coffee for six years before getting depressed and moving in-house.
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"You give me life...for this?" |
Foges denied that S&M lawyers were helping to make their peers obsolescent, claiming that, "highly-trained lawyers who would otherwise be scanning through thousands of pages of repetitive documents", would be freed to "spend more of their time analysing the findings and negotiating the terms of the deal". Surplus highly-trained lawyers and less highly-trained lawyers weren't mentioned, but perhaps they will be retained to check the robot's work, or replace its eye diodes.
Slaughter and May Senior Partner Steve Cooke said the legal due diligence process "is ripe for the revolution that Artificial Intelligence offers", while Lynch said he was "particularly pleased" to be collaborating with, "a law firm which leads the way when it comes to innovation and quality of service". The love-in has a history, with Slaughter and May acting for Lynch in 2011 on his notorious £7.1 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. HP decided the tech company was worthless, and is now suing Lynch for £5.1 billion with a trial set for 2018. So Slaughters should just double-check it's not being palmed off with a Tamagotchi taped to a calculator.
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