It's not just burger flipping and banking; artificial intelligence (AI) is now coming for lawyers.

In a landmark study reported by Hackernoon, 20 corporate attorneys specializing in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI in a contest to spot mistakes in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) - a commonly used legal document meant to keep people from divulging sensitive information.

It didn't turn out well for the lawyers...

The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes. The study made waves around the world and was covered across global media. -Hackernoon

And what did some of those attorneys say about the contest? Via Hackernoon:

Zakir Mir

“It is crucial to make mundane contract work more efficient, especially when there are 50–100 pages of contracts for some major deals (M&A large tenders with agreements or multinational corporations). It can really help lawyers sift through these documents, and cut down on the sometimes-deliberate verbosity of these documents which can allow one party to mask core issues.”

Zakir Mir, former regional counsel for BDP International, a $2billion global logistics firm, now at Allegiance International

Samantha Javier