The battle to outfit lawyers with useful virtual assistants is heating up. A few weeks ago we reported on the evolution of IBM Einstein for use in legal settings. Now, Riverview Law, one of the largest legal-services and private practice law firms in the world, has introduced a new virtual legal assistant named KIM (the name is an acronym for Knowledge, Intelligence and Meaning).

Gabe Friedman, who wrote about KIM’s debut for Bloomberg BNA, says that Riverview’s CEO Karl Chapman compares the new virtual assistant to Uber and Siri, “connect[ing] to a broad trend toward automation of services across all industries, and increasingly the legal sector.”

Friedman quotes Chapman as saying that “KIM could do things like understanding contracts more efficiently. There’s a way it can extract information from contracts and give them to a lawyer in a way so they can make better decisions.”

Although Friedman points out that, at this stage, “In general [Chapman’s] descriptions of KIM’s applicability tended toward the abstract,” and although KIM is currently targeted for placement with GCs rather than lawyers in private practice, there is no doubt that the application of artificial (or augmented) intelligence is moving ever closer to the practice of law in all its forms and manifestations.

I would be interested to know your thoughts on the future of AI in legal settings, or on any other matter, either in the comments section below, or directly via email.