Welcome Ross, The Smart Robot LEGAL ASSISTANT.


As I always would say, “With the advent of technology comes ease, speed and service”. Not only has technology driven its stake through the hearts of many disciplines/professions, it has furthered its journey into one area that almost seemed impossible for robots to survive. I MEAN TECHNOLOGY IS NOW LIVE IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION!



ROSS, an artificial intelligence software, is claimed by some researchers in the University College London, the University of Sheffield and the University of Pennsylvania, to have correctly predicted the outcomes of hundreds of cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights. Ross predicted the verdicts to an accuracy of 79%, according to the scientists involved. It gets better, ask ROSS to look up a court ruling from 15 years ago, and not only will ROSS search for the case in an instant, but it will offer opinions in understandable language about the old ruling's relevance to the case at hand.


The super-legal assistant uses IBM Watson to wade through huge amounts of legal data and, over time, learn how to best serve its users.


Andrew Arruda, CEO and co-founder of ROSS said to Tech Insider that “The challenge in building ROSS was finding a way to make it as intuitive as an actual colleague. That meant programming it to respond to people's normal manner of speaking, not just keyword-loaded fragments.”


Recently, ROSS was hired by a law firm Baker & Hostetler, which deals with bankruptcy cases and is increasingly being sought after by many law firms in order to help them wade through huge amounts of legal data.


Dr Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL, stated that "There is a lot of hype about ROSS but we do not see it replacing judges or lawyers any time soon. What we do think is they would find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes".


In my view, using ROSS could be a big less stressful and timesaver, but sole reliance on it may be verily dangerous and detrimental to the case, because ROSS is only equipped with the prowess to make a good guess without direct appreciation of the wider context outside of its training data and experience - ROSS can only make a good guess in relation to the data available to it, but as you may know, Law/Legal situation is more complex and wider than that. However, this is a welcome innovation for the Legal profession as the dispensation of justice will be done with prompt.

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