It&#x27;s worth reposting this 2011 NYT article, &quot;Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;05&#x2F;science&#x2F;05legal.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;05&#x2F;science&#x2F;05legal.html</a><p>&gt; <i>When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.</i><p>&gt; <i>But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.</i><p>&gt; <i>Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.</i>