Honestly this isn’t Legal AI click bait! But on the back of the big news in Legal IT recently (the news regarding Ravn and iManage, not the Tikit and NetDocuments news yesterday) it reminded me of this interesting post on Uber’s use of AI I caught in the tech press.

This was the article, Uber using AI to adjust prices according to the rider. It caught my eye as I am always intrigued by Ubers continued use of technology. Whether it’s pushing the envelope with the AppStore to try and fingerprint itself to track reset devices or use of specific apps to detect and avoid city agencies sting operations with the tool called greyball, their innovative use of tech (if not their moral use of it) is fascinating.

The AI article though got me thinking, is this a use of AI that law firms could utilise? On the face of it it looks a little bit dishonest or a recipe to annoy your clients even more, but factor in some specifics like acceptance of risk the client is likely to take, speed over quality or vice versa, whether they are a key client, a loyal client or a one off engagement, or a client in a market you want to break into, their location (ie for global firms in jurisdictions where the average local rate is much lower than the firms average global rate) etc etc and you could start to get an interesting model that is consistent to the client and tuned to their need, but also financially beneficial to the law firm. Of course as @jordan_law21 put it on twitter, “You can have a flat fee, or you can see our dockets, but not both. Build client trust and they won’t ask for the latter”. As with fixed fees you would need to be up front with the client that this “tailored rate” was in play but they would get the best value using it!

Like I say I’m not sure it would fly, but for innovation to flourish in law firms we need to have a few wild ideas, poke them a bit and be willing to bin them if they just won’t fly.

For those that missed it, this was the Ravn/iManage news that came out of ConnectLive17.

“that iManage, the leading provider of Work Product Management solutions, today announced that it will revolutionise the way companies find, extract and act on key information from documents and emails through its acquisition of RAVN Systems, whom as you know are leading experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Search” – press release here.

If you’re a customer of either it’s got to be exciting or at the very least interesting news. The possibilities of all that core law firm data in your document stores combined with Cognitive Search and AI are numerous. It also makes the introduction of AI solutions more about what you’re trying to do than about the technology complexity of getting all that volume of information through yet another system.