Washington: The US biggest law firms BakerHostetler has appointed a robot lawyer to assist with bankruptcy cases. The robot, called ROSS, has been marketed as “ the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney.”
ROSS is built upon Watson, IBM’s cognitive computer. “At BakerHostetler, we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients,” said Bob Craig, chief information officer.
The lawyers can ask ROSS their research question and the robot reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based answers.
The legal robot is accessed via computer and billed as a subscription service .
Arruda of ROSS Intelligence agrees. “ With ROSS, lawyers can focus on advocating for their client and being creative rather than spending hours swimming though hundreds of links , reading through hundreds of pages of cases looking for the passages of law they need to do their job ,” he said .
Making of ROSS, started in 2014 at the University of Toronto with the goal of building an artificial intelligence legal research assistant to allow lawyers to enhance and scale their abilities.
Just ten months after they began teaching ROSS bankruptcy law, the company has been commercialising its first offering.