At the moment, legal AI is at the "frothy" part of the
hype cycle. It's a bit like the scene What did the Romans
ever do for us? in the film the Life of Brian, but in
reverse. The scene's premise is that the Romans did little, but
of course they did a lot. Legal AI promises a lot but at the moment
has delivered little. This isn't surprising as we're just
at the start of the machine learning era. Somewhat frustratingly,
while a decade from now it will be obvious in hindsight that the
world beater was going to be "X", right now we don't
know what that "X" will be.
Frothy AI today calls to mind the dot.com bubble. At the height
of the bubble, when share prices peaked in March 2000, only 5% of
the world's population was connected to the internet. It
wasn't until five or ten years later that the combination of
Mobile + Social + Cloud + Data emerged as the world beater (the
dot.com "X"), and it's only this year that more than
half of the world's population now have an
