November 10, 1997

Computer Legal Adviser to Be Introduced Next Month

By GEANNE ROSENBERG

rtificial intelligence, or computer-based reasoning and problem solving, has, after years of hype and disappointments, begun to come of age in a few fields marked by clear rules and precise terms. It has been used to help doctors diagnose diseases; it has been used to beat the chess champion of the world.

Credit: Nancy Palmieri for the New York Times Professor Edwina L. Rissland pioneered case-based reasoning for computers.

But another goal in artificial-intelligence research has proved more elusive. For more than 25 years, experts in artificial intelligence in the United States and Western Europe have tried to figure out how to teach computers to think as lawyers do.

Lawyers who have followed the efforts have been skeptical, doubting whether computers could perform legal reasoning. But next month, their skepticism will be tested by the Virtual Patent Advisor, a new software product designed to identify and help avoid patent conflicts.

In December, General Electric Co.'s GE Power Systems unit, based in Schenectady, N.Y., plans to introduce the system, the first in a series of virtual legal advisers intended to prevent and help solve corporate legal problems.

The result of research by Jnana Technologies Corp., the Virtual Patent Advisor aims to help identify patent-infringement problems. The system, which can run on a desktop computer and can use the Internet, questions an engineer to define the structure and purpose of an invention idea and then searches data bases and compares design features with existing patents.

It can then create lists of potentially conflicting patents, apply rules of patent law to the facts it has gathered and generate reports to the company's lawyers.

Ideally, the engineer, apprised of potential conflicts, could alter the design or turn to the company to find some other solution. Robert Lampe Jr., a senior patent lawyer at GE Power Systems, said he expected the product would reduce to less than an hour a process that now takes as long as a week. "It's a tremendous productivity tool," he said.

Computers have long been used to conduct keyword searches in legal research and to prepare tax forms and wills. But David Johnson, chairman of Counsel Connect and co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute, said the virtual advisers would go well beyond this, bringing together case-based and rule-based reasoning capacities and the ability to draw on multiple data bases.

At least one doubter was intrigued by the idea. "It sounds like it would make legal practice more fun — get rid of the drudgery," said Ronald Dworkin, a professor of law and philosophy at New York University and a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University.

"But I guess what I'd insist on is that this is all limited by the fact that the law is essentially imaginative and interpretive," he added. These qualities, he said, "can't be programmed, no matter how sophisticated the programming techniques."

Wendy Gordon, a law professor at Boston University, said she was concerned that a computer, unlike a human, could not perceive voice quality, facial expressions and other cues that signal confusion or ambiguity.

And Robert Sheehan, executive partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, said, "The most advanced cutting edge of the law is always where you're able to take a set of facts and come up with a novel idea." Software, he said, "won't be creative."

But those who work in artificial intelligence say that to the extent that law relies upon tightly woven arguments, supporting precedent and well-defined rules, it can be a perfect template for artificial intelligence.

hat is because the fields best suited for artificial intelligence are the highly mathematical ones that have "very little subjectivity in them, like chess," said Edwina Rissland, professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and president of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Law.

The fields that lend themselves least to artificial intelligence, she added, are those "in which it's very hard to pin down the meanings of the words."

"Probably much harder than law," she added, "would be things like politics and further still would be something like psychiatry."

“It's hard for a good lawyer to come up with novel, inventive arguments, and it will be even harder for a machine to do so — probably.”
Edwina Rissland, , professor of computer science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Professor Rissland said that research into the use of artificial intelligence in legal contexts had divided into two general categories.

In the first, rule-based reasoning, the computer uses if-then statements to move from facts to conclusions or from possible conclusions to supporting facts. In the second, case-based reasoning, experience from previous, analogous cases is applied to solve new problems.

Professor Rissland, in more than a decade of research, pioneered computerized case-based reasoning and constructed a system that meshed the two forms of reasoning.

Frederic Parnon, a lawyer, ran across Professor Rissland's work in 1995 when he decided to devise software systems that could perform legal functions. He later founded Jnana, which developed the Virtual Patent Advisor.

Professor Rissland has served as an adviser and occasional consultant on Jnana's virtual advisers, though she has no financial stake in the project.

After spending two years creating the underlying technology for the systems, Jnana approached large corporations and asked them to support development of applications addressing specific legal concerns in exchange for favorable licensing terms.

In trying to identify a prospective client for a new technological product, Parnon said, "You have to get this confluence of someone who's enlightened, who has a business problem to solve; then there's a fit."

GE was the first large company to sign on. Several other companies are considering participation in other adviser systems.

Parnon said that a telecommunications company, which he would not identify, was working with Jnana to develop a system to advise managers about human resources. A major legal-research company, he said, is interested in software that will query legal researchers about facts, search data bases and send researchers to the appropriate areas of the law.

Parnon declined to provide details of the development costs or licensing terms. But companies that have not participated in development would pay for the software at an annual cost equivalent to the salary of a junior lawyer.

But even artificial-intelligence experts acknowledge its inherent weakness. "It's hard for a good lawyer to come up with novel, inventive arguments," Professor Rissland said, "and it will be even harder for a machine to do so — probably."

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• GE Power Systems

• Jnana Technologies Corp.

• Counsel Connect

• Cyberspace Law Institute

• International Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Law

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