Ride the Lightning

Watson's Son Ross: "The Super Intelligent Attorney"

March 4, 2015

This is one of those moments when I think lawyers should be truly afraid. I had reported earlier that IBM was moving into the legal vertical. It started a new annual program called the Watson University Competition.

A group of University of Toronto students have formed a new startup venture that built a legal application on top of IBM's Watson platform. The "son of Watson" is called Ross, the super intelligent attorney. The students placed second in the IBM contest, and stands a good chance of receiving support from IBM for building a cloud-based service that can answer complicated legal questions for lawyers.

Ross, by taking advantage of the natural language and cognitive computing platform that Watson offers, can predict the outcome of court cases with a confidence rating, assess legal precedents, and suggest readings to prepare for cases. The team is signing up its first customers for pilot programs. Ross is going to be targeted at small to medium-sized law firms initially.

IBM will be supplying the Ross team with continued access to Watson’s cloud platform. There’s also a chance IBM’s venture capital wing will invest in the startup, says Stephen Perelgut, senior relationship manager of academic partnerships at the IBM Canada Lab.

The students created Ross by loading a huge volume of public legal documents and used the subject matter experts on their team to calibrate Watson to provide useful answers on the documents. What makes Watson so powerful is its ability to learn – so the more lawyers use it, the better it gets.

Ross has a huge volume of knowledge to rely upon from the public records that have been loaded on to it. The team is looking to strike deals with courts so they can feed more legal documents into Ross as soon as they become available.

LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters cannot be happy with Ross on the horizon. I see Ross as a replacement for a lot of young lawyers as well over time, particularly if it masters form-based lawyering and document review, which it certainly will. And if Ross should go public, a lot of people are going to question whether they need lawyers at all.

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