On November 8, Seraphin.legal and IBM took part in a workshop organized by the Lyon Bar Incubator at the Maison des Avocats de Lyon. The objective of this workshop was to make lawyers aware of the issues related to the structuring and analysis of legal data, thanks to a first level use of data enrichment and tagging tools.
Friendly welcome and first objective: to educate
Friday 8 November, 9am. Rosa and I arrive at the Maison des avocats, a modern building with clean architectural lines. The IBM team is on site and we discuss the functional organisation of the workshop before the lawyers from Lyon arrive.
Which format should be adopted? Should a traditional conference format be preferred or should lawyers be invited to use the two technological tools made available by IBM?
After careful consideration, we decided on a Normandy-style format: the workshop started with a short general presentation, and continued with practice.
In the age of legal big data, the challenge for the lawyer is to learn how to make the most of his or her knowledge
10 am, arrival of the participants. Rosa explained that lawyers are confronted with a multitude of data, coming from multiple sources (legislative and regulatory texts at national and international level, case law, legal acts, doctrine...). However, most of the time, this data is not very well exploited: there is no metadata model linking them and it is impossible to use them in a rationalised way.
The challenge is therefore twofold: the enhancement of legal data will enable lawyers to quickly identify the data essential to their activities. But this enhancement can only be done after having been trained in the technological tools that use AI.
The Data Lawyer, enriching and building with AI
12:00 noon, working lunch all together. This workshop was an opportunity for Seraphin to show lawyers how to identify and value legal data, which is part of the skills of the Data Lawyer, a profession we are developing. Thus, between two bites of pizza, half of the lawyers were able to annotate court decisions while the other half developed a chatbot. Both exercises were performed on Watson, IBM's AI.
This workshop was a unique performance: lawyers were able to use AI tools by applying them to legal content (court decisions), and by building a chatbot to guide users on the topic of RGPD.
Curiosity and an appetite for technology, the two ingredients of a successful workshop
4pm, return to Paris and assessment. If the workshop had an objective of training lawyers in digital issues and tools, it is certain that this meeting was also formative for Rosa and me: we were able to meet lawyers who were curious and lucid about the digital transformations affecting their profession: I remember a lawyer specialising in family law who built her own website, adapted to her clients' needs. This lawyer, a budding data lawyer, has also developed her own chatbot to better organise her professional time.
There is no doubt that this workshop was a success, Lyon's lawyers are ready to work with innovative technologies and we will be delighted to accompany them in this transformation during theAcademy training sessions in particular.
