Legal Research

Everyone is busy imagining why the IBM computer Watson is so important to their own industry. Robert C. Weber writes in the National Law Journal about how great it will be when computers like Watson can perform legal research on their own.

Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of the information you need to do your job ? a digital associate, if you will. With the technology underlying Watson, called Deep QA, you could have a vast, self-contained database loaded with all of the internal and external information related to your daily tasks, whether you’re preparing for litigation, protecting intellectual property, writing contracts or negotiating an acquisition. Pose a question and, in milliseconds, Deep QA can analyze hundreds of millions of pages of content and mine them for facts and conclusions ? in about the time it takes to answer a question on a quiz show.

Heard through Harvard Law Library on twitter