As young law students across the country wrap up their final exams, many are already starting to worry about landing their first job.

That’s not a problem ROSS has.

He’s won a place at a prestigious North American firm, where he’ll be working in bankruptcy law. The catch is, he’s not actually a human being.

ROSS is an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by a team at the University of Toronto that has now spun out into a San Francisco startup.

BakerHostetler, a firm with more than 940 lawyers across the U.S., announced in early May it was taking on ROSS.

Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO of ROSS Intelligence and part of the original development team, said lawyers can ask ROSS a question the way they would a human colleague.

“It understands what that lawyer’s asking for,” Arruda said over the phone from San Francisco.

“It surfaces not just the cases that will help that lawyer but actually the direct passages from those cases that best get that lawyer up and running,” he added.

Like iPhone’s Siri on steroids, ROSS promises to cut down the time it takes to retrieve complex legal data from hours to minutes. He also learns and gets better with each use.

ROSS is not a physical bot in the office but a complex AI system; it doesn’t have the physical presence of an R2-D2 or Wall-E, but could easily outmaneuver them mentally.

“Before, the human had to go through (and) read all the cases. The case could be 30 pages to find those three, four sentences they needed,” said Arruda.

The idea was hatched during a 2014 university competition sponsored by IBM to find innovative ways to use “Watson,” a computer system the company developed that uses natural language processing to answer questions after sifting through large amounts of data.

Watson appeared on Jeopardy in 2011, where it beat two flesh-and-blood champions, said Steve Engels, an associate professor in the teaching stream at the University of Toronto’s computer science department and one of the professors who taught the original course behind ROSS.

The U of T team finished second, christening their creation ROSS because it sounded friendly.

“ROSS is going to be able to be the smartest, most knowledgeable legal expert, but you still need some humans to be able to take the information that ROSS can give you and figure out how to use it,” Engels said, calling combing through documents a “mundane, menial task.”

ROSS is also being used by another U.S. firm, Wisconsin-based von Briesen & Roper. The firm’s chief information officer, William Caraher, said he was “blown away” by the professional briefs ROSS produced.

“It really looks like somebody took a lot of time to format and draft a legal opinion. It does look like a human-created report,” he said.

Jordan Furlong, an Ottawa-based consultant and legal market analyst, called ROSS the “the next level up” in a longer-term trend of using AI in the legal field.

Legal Analytics by Lex Machina, for example, mines litigation data for clues about how a judge will rule, and software has been available for years that makes going through electronic documents in legal processes easier.

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Furlong said the rise of software like ROSS is “one of the many factors that are combining to reduce the demand for lawyers, especially the demand for new and relatively unskilled lawyers.”

But he said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that ROSS will not put skilled entry-level lawyers out of work and instead will free them up to do less menial tasks.

“I suppose the dystopic view is that law firms, in an ever-growing search to maximize profits, will look for more and more ways to reduce human payroll human costs.”