Ian Lopez, Legaltech News
Clutch Group is betting it can make
AI more "accessible" and "intelligible" to stakeholders via
automated compliance, surveillance tools.
Credit: Peshkova/Shutterstock.com
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of those topics that leaves lawyers
either in awe of possibility or rolling their eyes at the thought of a robot
lawyer. Yet for many on either side of the aisle, AI remains incomprehensible,
leaving professionals fearful and even frustrated. And this mix is dangerous
when trying to get stakeholders on board with purchasing.
Legal services provider Clutch Group is betting it can get around the legal
industry's aversion to AI, and its approach is simple: partner with widely used
brands in legal technology to consolidate multiple data analytics services into
a single application. Today, the company announced that for the past nine
months, it has been working on new AI solutions for e-discovery, compliance,
litigation and surveillance with Brainspace, Nuix and kCura.
The first thing Clutch wants to do, explained Clutch president Brandon
Daniels in a conversation with Legaltech News, is to deploy machine learning
decisions to augment decisions in a way that feels "comfortable" and
"familiar." This is key, because for stakeholders, "although
extremely experienced legal and intelligence professionals, the application of
artificial intelligence tends to create some trepidation."
Clutch looks at kCura's Relativity as "the iOS of compliance,"
Daniels said, and is using it as a backdrop to develop a "unified user
experience." Further, Relativity is an elastic workplace, which simplifies
the integration of other technologies. The decision, which means that Clutch is
a Relativity Premium Hosting Partner, was based on user comfort with the system
as well as functionality.
Brainspace, meanwhile, brings to the table patented machine learning
technology and visual analytics typically applied for compliance challenges and
internal investigations. In the past year, Brainspace has also partnered with Discovia, intelligence community investor In-Q-Tel, and e-discovery provider Compliance. Brainspace technology also operated in Relativity prior to the Clutch
partnership.
Lastly, partnering with Nuix will allow Clutch's upcoming services and
technology to ingest and analyze massive data sets quickly. Nuix's information
management technology is used for regulatory matters, data privacy and insider
threats, among other enterprise concerns.
The overall goal, as Daniels put it, is to take "the best and the
brightest of each platform and create a new and enhanced application that
allows us to stream huge volumes of data through our environment in very short
periods of time." He also wants to "make it easy for people to then
interact with augmented intelligence."
Specifically, Clutch is working toward technologies for in-house and
outside counsel in document review, employee surveillance and monitoring,
analytics, litigation investigation technology, data security, and streamlined
collaboration platforms. "With the specialization different applications
bring to the table, we recognized that we really need different parts of the
process covered by different sorts of providers," Daniels said.
Currently, Clutch's client base is composed of Fortune 250 banks, including
seven of the world's top 20, Daniels said. From this experience, he's learned
that when it comes to technology, the financial sector is more forward-looking
than legal.
"Even the notion of utilizing artificial intelligence is still very
nascent in the legal compliance area," he said. Daniels noted that while
the industry has seen "small sparks" in Clifford Chance and
Linklaters, he said that in legal, "where you see resistance is when you
use artificial intelligence to replace objective decision-making."
Nevertheless, challenges faced in finance are the foundation for Clutch's
approach, as financial services, when it comes to regulations, focus on conduct
(e.g., MiFID) as well as
surveillance and monitoring. Clutch Group is currently focusing on companies in
the financial and life sciences sectors, but in 2017 will begin to more
directly work around data security.
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