Artificial Lawyer – “Global law firm Baker McKenzie is to try and predict client demand through a partnership with AI company SparkBeyond. The Big Data-crunching and predictive analysis company also works with several governments around the world. Knowing what your clients will want from you before perhaps they or the rest of the market does is the Holy Grail of predictive intelligence for many businesses. This would allow the firm to get in the right shape and allocate the right resources early, as well as prepare marketing initiatives to win work before many other firms had perhaps thought to consider a certain sales strategy or noticed a new type of client need. The move comes as the firm’s Reinvent Law innovation group moves beyond its former Frankfurt base and takes on a global role, with the prediction experiment the first project it has taken on. A spokesperson for Bakers told Artificial Lawyer the idea is that the firm will feed in its own data about the work it does to SparkBeyond, which will then study patterns in a mass of other economic and sector-related data that is has access to already. From there it will make some predictions about what Bakers’ clients may need from it in the future. The spokesperson said: ‘We will be testing this on ourselves first, and then if we can identify what clients will want next, we can then look at developing client solutions.’..”