IBM’s artificially intelligent lawyer Ross gets hired.

Law firm Baker & Hostetler has become the first law firm to license the AI-enabled product developed by IBM, in its bankruptcy practice. Ross is a digital legal expert, which is built on IBM Watson’s cognitive computing system, to help with legal research.

31% - 35% : Amount of time spent by legal associates slogging through raw data

In a recent study, it was found that legal associates spend anything between 31% and 35% of their time slogging through masses of data. After extensive research based on IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson, Ross was created. It aims to solve the two biggest problems with the legal field, price point and the enormous amount of time required to sort through data, in order to come up with an efficient legal assistant that can completely disrupt the legal research industry. And now it has gone on to find its place in a law firm for the first time.

Marketed as the world’s first AI attorney, it allows users to get answers to natural language questions. Even more importantly, it can adapt itself to improve its search results using machine learning technology. Seeing the confidence being bestowed on this one-of-a-kind, brand new technology by an actual law firm to solve its real life problems, we can safely assume that this will be a complete game-changer for the legal industry.

The team behind ROSS, under the leadership of 27-year old Andrew Arruda, is expanding its capabilities so it can be used in other areas of law, like criminal, tax and IP. But at the moment, Baker & Hostetler’s 50 member bankruptcy practice is extensively using ROSS in order to make their lives easier, especially with regards to its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings related to the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

With companies like artificially intelligent contract review platform Lawgeex raising millions of dollars in funding, and top law firms like Dentons backing ROSS, only time will tell what the future holds for AI in changing the face of the legal industry as we know it.

All we can say is that we have barely scratched the surface.