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Risk assessment for legal AI products
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: April 5, 2019
It was inevitable, as Mr. Smith said. Even though the field of legal AI is just beginning, and even though early adapters and their platform suppliers seem to be few and far between, potential end users still need to be able to evaluate the products that are on the market. And now maybe they can, thanks to this product (and thanks to artificallawyer.com again for the tip).
Counself (https://counself.com/site/c_corporate.html) is a California-based product from Infiniglobe that claims to streamline the “arduous and manual” task of legal tech risk analysis. The company provides law firms with “vendor cloud security.” Which they need.
The platform is aimed at compliance teams, whether in-house or outside counsel, a “secure, collaborative and automated solution” for making sure that these complex products are safe for use. It conducts risk assessment for all legal platforms, and monitors vendors for compliance.
It is capable of performing these functions for AI providers, so that puts it on a cutting edge for these kinds of consulting firms.
AI can be seen as particularly susceptible to security problems because it almost always requires data to be moved offsite into the cloud, even if the servers are owned by the AI providing company. This whole universe of legal AI risk assessment is new, and so the chance that end users have protocols in place to deal with these security issues is pretty remote.
So a company like Counself has a broad pathway into this field.
Of course, all new platforms come with some risk, but AI may provide very particular risks. For instance, recent reports have found that AI tends to reflect certain prejudices of its developers. This means that there is the risk that the AI will generate inaccurate results. This can be a deal breaker in e-discovery, obviously.
Counself also has the capability of assessing the risk of new apps running afoul of privacy laws, and of helping to create proper RFPs that include risk assessment for new products.
Counself is obviously for large firms itself, but the fact that AI and privacy are now industry topics of concern is a good thing, and, like everything else, should trickle down to the rest of the industry.