Push Research: How AI Is Fundamentally Changing The Way We Research The Law
'Push Research' is one of the most consequential applications of artificial intelligence technology, especially to lawyers.
Twenty years ago, two Stanford graduate students worked on an idea that would become the underpinnings for one of the most important innovations — and one of the most successful companies — of the past century. The idea, “PageRank,” is that you can determine how important a web page is based on which other pages linked to it. This simple insight developed into Google, still today’s best way of finding websites.
Since this innovation two decades ago, not much has changed about how we find information online — not on Google nor for lawyers in the legal databases we interact with daily. You still type in words and see a list of responses. The algorithms have sharpened, but we haven’t seen major leaps forward in the way that PageRank fundamentally changed everything.
That is, until now. A new wave of technology will transform the way we think about research, and may have an impact equal to PageRank. That technology, what some are calling “Push Research,” is one of the most consequential applications of artificial intelligence technology, especially to lawyers.
Push Research
The concept behind Push Research is relatively straightforward: Your computer “understands” your context, and based on that understanding, proactively sends you the information you need to see, sometimes before you even knew to ask the question.
Imagine, for example, that your computer “understands” your context at work — that you are currently working on two patent cases, one about a biopharmaceutical and another about a medical device, but you’re also taking on an immigration asylum case pro bono. The computer has “read” all of the documents associated with each matter, and thus knows the factual, legal, and procedural issues in each case. It will then start doing some pretty incredible things for you. The technology will watch the docket and when opposing counsel files a motion, it will start finding the cases and briefs you need to research your response. If a new precedent is handed down that may impact the patentability of medical devices, it will alert you. And when you conduct a text search, the results will be personalized based on what case you’re working on — highlighting either asylum cases or biopharmaceutical cases, for example.
This may sound far out, but it’s happening right now. In the consumer world, Google has recognized this is the next step for search, and has already folded in Push Search into its “Assistant.” It understands your context — for example, where you currently are based on your GPS location and where your next meeting is based on what’s on your calendar — and based on that, will alert you that you need to leave five minutes early due to unexpected traffic.
In the legal realm, Intraspexion works for in-house lawyers to help prevent lawsuits. By reviewing employee emails and other communications, it can proactively highlight areas of potential concern before they become something bigger. Similarly, Casetext’s AI legal research assistant, CARA, can follow your docket and email you relevant research when opposing counsel files a motion, including relevant cases they did not cite and relevant briefs from which you can draw inspiration for how to prepare your response.
You may not have known that you were running late, that there might be a litigation risk at your company, or that there are weak points in opposing counsel’s moving papers. The computer proactively did the work for you, delivering valuable answers to you before you even asked the questions. It’s an entirely new way of searching for information, and a paradigm shift from the last two decades.
Why Push Research is Being Developed Now
This technology isn’t just awesome; it’s also being developed to respond to a real and increasing problem in the legal profession.
Lawyers are the epitome of “knowledge workers” — our main capital is knowledge and information — and as such, we spend an inordinate amount of time seeking out information. On average, attorneys spend one out of every three working hours researching the law. (For me, sometimes it felt more like 80%). So, for us attorneys, the power of the technology that we use to find information is a matter of great consequence.
This has become especially true recently. For decades, as little as we wanted to admit it, researching quickly wasn’t that important to lawyers — you’d just bill that time to your client. Not so now. Efficiently providing top-quality services for our clients has become a top concern. The 2017 Altman Weil Law Firms in Transition survey found that 94% of firm leaders understand that improved practice efficiency is a permanent trend. A Mattern Associates report finds that only 25% of clients pay for legal research costs, and that number will likely drop to zero0 in the next few years. This may be part of why, according to the 2017 Legal Trends Report from Clio, lawyers spend just 29% of each workday on billable work.
While efficiency has become a premium that distinguishes some firms and attorneys from others, so of course does the quality of practice. And today, clients are asking what feels like the impossible: do a better job in less time.
This is one of the main reasons we’re seeing Push Research being applied in legal tech now. With efficiency and quality of work at a premium, there is now a demand for technologies like Push Research that both make you more efficient by doing the work proactively for you, and also improve the quality of the work by highlighting information that might otherwise be missed. For those in the legal tech sector paying attention to these trends in the profession, the demand for these kinds of technologies drives their development.
The demand is one part of the equation. The other part is technology. The last decade, and especially the last few years, has led to an explosion in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that are creating genuinely new possibilities for attorneys.
The Future of Search
Most of us have come to expect that when we type a search term into Google, the results returned to us are ordered based on what is most important. Within the next few years, it will feel just as natural to have our technology sharing information with us before we type in a search term. Just as PageRank transformed the way we access information, it’s difficult to overstate how transformative Push Research will be, especially for the legal profession. Law firms leveraging this technology will be able to, for the first time, truly do more with less, and provide their clients with the highest-efficiency, highest-quality representation.
Jake Heller is the Founder and CEO of Casetext. Before starting Casetext, Jake was a litigator at Ropes & Gray. He’s a Silicon Valley native, and has been programming since childhood. For more information about CARA, Casetext’s AI-backed legal research assistant, visit info.casetext.com/cara-ai.
