Noah Waisberg’s Machine Learning Workshop

by Tian Gao, J.D. Candidate 2023

Noah Waisberg is the co-founder and CEO of Zuva, an AI software company, but he first shot to fame in the legal tech world as the founder of Kira Systems. On Tuesday, October 12^th, I met Noah at his machine learning workshop at the Future of Law Lab. He showed UofT students how to use Kira while having an open discussion with us on the changing landscape of the legal world.

I had previously heard of Kira Systems as a type of software used by many firms, but this was my first time learning about what it does and seeing it in action. Kira is a machine learning software that reads and analyzes contracts using knowledge that it builds up from a dataset of other contracts. You can use an existing model to perform tasks that the software already knows how to do or you can create a new model and teach it to do something new. Law firms routinely use Kira to speed up volume-heavy work such as due diligence. It turns out that 18 of the top 25 M&A firms in the world use the program.

During the workshop, Noah created a new model on Kira and taught it to find further assurances clauses. As he worked the software, he took questions from the audience. The students around me were lively and responsive. After all, the two audience members who asked the most questions would be receiving free copies of his best-selling book, “AI For Lawyers”.

Noah explained that he had written the book partly to convince lawyers that it was in their interest to use technology that would speed up legal work. Kira Systems doesn’t replace human lawyers, because document review still requires human eyes, but it does make the process faster. An early challenge for Noah had been the problem of convincing lawyers who bill by the hour to work faster. Why bill fewer hours if you could bill more?

But Noah had answers to that. One answer was lowering your client’s exposure to risk; with technological assistance, firms can spend time reviewing a greater percentage of documents that they would not have otherwise reviewed. Another answer was that there are currently legal problems that remain unsolved because most people don’t have legal representation and it’s economically inefficient to tackle every problem with legal solutions. Greater efficiency in the legal profession can allow the field to expand into different areas and solve different problems.

The law’s potential for expansion is also why Noah is not concerned that lawyers will be replaced by automation. His advice for future lawyers is to not specialize in things that computers are good at. It’s true, the job will look a little different, but lawyers will still be essential.