Linklaters and Pinsent Masons have become thelatest law firms to invest in artificial intelligence, asthe legal profession tries to automate the mundanetasks that have traditionally been the preserve ofjunior lawyers.Linklaters has developed Verifi, a computerprogramme that can sift through 14 UK andEuropean regulatory registers to check client names for banks. The company said it couldprocess thousands of names overnight.Edward Chan, banking partner at Linklaters, said:“Previously it would have taken a trainedjunior lawyer an average of 12 minutes to search a single customer name.“AI is an indispensible tool for coping with the ever-growing amounts of data which lawyershave to handle in running complex matters. Our lawyers are not engineers or data scientists.Good solid legal skills remain what we look for in our lawyers.”Pinsent Masons has developed a programme that reads and analyses clauses in loanagreements. Its TermFrame system also helps guide lawyers through transactions and pointthem towards the correct precedents at each stage of a process.Another law firm, Dentons, has set up NextLaw Labs, a virtual company which looks at theapplication of technology with the law. It has invested in ROSS, an IBM Watson-powered legaladviser app that streamlines legal research, saving lawyers’ time and clients’ money. ROSS iscurrently being pilot-tested at Dentons and approximately 20 other law firms.Hodge, Jones & Allen, a law firm, has worked with academics from University CollegeLondon to create software that assesses the merits of personal injury cases.Professor Richard Susskind, a technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice, has predictedradical change in the legal sector, pointing out that intelligent search systems could nowoutperform junior lawyers and paralegals in reviewing large sets of documents and selecting themost relevant.He told a legal conference last month that the legal profession had five years to reinvent itselffrom being legal advisers to legal technologists and criticised law schools for “churning out20th-century lawyers”.A recent study by Deloitte suggested that technology has already contributed to a reductionof about 31,000 jobs in the legal sector, including roles such as legal secretaries and a further39 per cent of jobs were at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next twodecades.There has been speculation that law is ripe for “Uberisation”, becoming the next target oftechnological disruption.One smaller firm, Riverview Law, has partnered with the computer science department atLiverpool University to work on artifical intelligence products.Riverview is setting-up a separate technology business to exploit its software and theintellectual property that it has and is creating. It has launched a virtual assistant Kimdesigned to help legal teams make quicker and better decisions.Karl Chapman, chief executive of Riverview, said Kim has three varying levels of complexityincluding one level where a lawyer can ask it to suggest the best order to renegotiate a series ofcorporate contracts.Many believe that AI will simply automate more routine parts of legal work so that lawyersfocus on more complex, high value areas of client work.“I would liken it to mathematicians calculating sums on slide rulers before computers.Computers didn’t do away with mathematicians who are probably more highly valued now thanthey were before,” said Orlando Conetta, a computer scientist and head of research and development at Pinsents.