From the interview with Canadian Lawyer Magazine.
From image analysis to sentiment detection, innovative tools put users ahead of the curve.
As of three years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) became a leading topic of conversation, sparking speculation, hesitation, and excitement amongst professionals. It wasn’t long before SmartAdvocate, provider of the leading case management software built by lawyers for lawyers, was fielding requests from its users who wanted to see AI in the platform — but who had no specific insight into what they actually wanted from the technology.
“We said sure, but what do you need? And they’d just say ‘AI,’” recalls Igor Selizhuk, CTO at SmartAdvocate. “So, we added AI to our platform in several different ways. Our philosophy is that developing in-house makes sense with certain functionalities where you don’t want your clients nickeled and dimed for small things.”
With SmartAdvocate’s AI Tools, it’s the best of both worlds: SmartAdvocate built in what was clearly necessary but is also spending a lot of time and resources on developing additional functionality. From demand letter creation and case and document analysis to adding notes to cases and in-dashboard text and email rewrite capabilities — whether to change tone, weed out too much ‘legalese,’ check spelling, or translate to a plaintiff’s first language, to name a few uses. SmartAdvocate users soon had useful and convenient AI tools at their fingertips. And as firms began to use it, they started reaching out with specific requests. One personal injury practice mentioned they’d like to leverage AI to analyze images, so the SmartAdvocate team developed that capability and rolled it out, with great success.
Like how AI summarizes or translates documents, it’s able to review images of an accident scene or injuries sustained and give feedback in response to prompts from the user. Are there code violations? Or issues with the surroundings, such as an unpatched pothole or broken staircase? It’s not legal advice, but a quick assessment that allows lawyers to give a timely response to potential clients.
“Humans can review and adjust, but it’s a unique way to determine whether or not there’s a viable case, or at least whether there’s reason to get more information,” Selizhuk explains. “That’s the history of SmartAdvocate and one of our big advantages: We get feedback from clients, listen to it, and incorporate much of what they suggest. We do our own research of course, but we follow the client’s lead.”
Dedicated to the cutting-edge
Selizhuk, who came onboard SmartAdvocate in 2011, finds AI and its incredible pace of development “interesting and exciting.” Looking ahead, SmartAdvocate is dedicated to the cutting-edge. It follows advancements closely and pays attention to new integrations, a key component of SmartAdvocate given “we can’t be everything for everyone,” Selizhuk notes.
SmartAdvocate boasts some great built-in features like document management, reporting dashboards, and automations, but the team doesn’t try to recreate Outlook, Microsoft Word, or Adobe PDF Editor, for example. Certain things require significant investments to develop, and there are dedicated companies doing a great job with their respective solutions.
“Whether we develop it or expand our partner network, the important thing is, we give our users access to what’s new, now, and useful.”
AI plays a major role in improving efficiency and productivity, mainly because it processes and summarizes large volumes of information in seconds. It excels at tasks like analyzing extensive medical records or litigation documents — something that AI doesn’t do better than a human lawyer or paralegal, but does significantly faster. For example, AI could be tasked with finding inconsistencies or gaps in a deposition of hundreds of pages, in seconds.
“A human with the assistance of AI is much more productive in a lot of situations,” Selizhuk sums up.
What does the future hold?
The capability of AI assistance is only expected to ramp up. There are already several improvements in the pipeline, like AI agents that can manage more abstract instructions, as well as execute a sequence of tasks, as opposed to needing one prompt at a time. Those multi-step interactions are imminent, Selizhuk says, adding that another impressive capability SmartAdvocate is looking to introduce is sentiment analysis.
For this feature, AI looks at communication with clients to detect if there may soon be a problem, based on the tone and wording of the email or text. Another too on the horizon is automatic classification of documents, where again AI can save time by scanning incoming documents for client names, case numbers, or claim numbers and labeling and filing them accordingly.
Overall, SmartAdvocate’s goal is the same as it was at inception: Build out a comprehensive legal case management system that supports lawyers across all practice areas. Keeping pace with those moving goal posts relies on “iterative development,” and the company’s AI journey will evolve alongside the technology and the input of its users.
“We get a lot of thoughtful and innovative feedback, like the image analysis request,” Selizhuk says. “We’ll be looking for more of that from clients — we have a seasonal ‘Holiday Wish List’ reach out, in addition to a dedicated button on our interface — and we are always keeping an eye on new capabilities. Once they become available, we’ll incorporate them.”
