Law firm hires IBM Watson AI based legal assistant Ross

One of the largest law firms in the US, Baker & Hostetler has hired Ross, according to a report at Futurism . Ross is a natural language legal assistant for lawyers, that is based on IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence. Ross can sift through mountains of legal data, to give succinct and direct answer to questions. It works like a search engine, but instead of giving a list of answers that again puts the onus of shifting through the data on the user, Ross just gives one most appropriate answer.

Ross is different from other digital assistants that do this, because instead of basing the results on keyword indexing, Ross actually has cognitive capabilities. Ross can derive conclusions and facts from data, and delivers these as a result to a search, with associated references and citations. Apart from sifting through law books, and documents related to legal cases, as well as past relevant cases, Ross can also monitor news feeds. Any news that can have an impact on an ongoing litigation are monitored and curated by Ross. Again, this is a cognitive approach and not a keyword based approach.

Then, there is the actual interface, which is similar and consistent across devices. Like many machine learning applications based on neural networks, Ross gets better with use, and learns with increased operation. Ross can also undergo focused training for use in a particular way.

Ross is employed at the bankruptcy division of Baker & Hostetler. Ross had been incubated at the law firm right from the inception of the technology, so there might be more announces of other law firms also using the AI attorney.