Karla Capela Morais

With more than 100 million lawsuits on the dockets throughout Brazil’s multiple court systems, lawyers needed a simpler way to file and track cases. Karla, an attorney, founded the startup KOY–Law Intelligence, which provides law firms with a legal management platform built with IBM Watson. The platform, known as Norma, recognizes and classifies lawsuits, schedules legal actions and tracks cases as they move in the system. By reducing research time from hours to seconds, KOY’s clients can spend their time on more challenging legal work. Thanks to Norma, some of KOY’s clients are four times as productive, resulting in millions of dollars in savings and revenue increases of as much as 30%.

What was the business opportunity you sought to address by using Watson?
There are many different justice systems in Brazil, with more than 100 million lawsuits on the dockets. Complicating matters further, most lawyers rely on manual processes and are bogged down in paperwork. They don’t have sufficient time to make sense of the many details in cases, let alone track them in the system. Lawyers needed to be able to quickly and accurately examine massive amounts of data. I recognized that IBM Watson could leverage natural language processing by reading and understanding all of that casework.

What has your company achieved with Watson?
With Watson supporting KOY’s legal management platform, which we endearingly call “Norma,” our clients have drastically reduced the manual hours they spend on cases and are able to approach their work in a new way.

What do you know now about AI that you wish you had known when you started? 
AI is a fascinating technology; it definitely works better than you think. Understanding how Watson “thinks” and “talks” initially challenged our team. We had to learn how far the technology would extend to leverage our business. Working with IBM, we came to see that AI won’t take people’s jobs. It will instead let us do what we do best—setting our hands free, giving us time to use our brains and allowing us to be creative!

Why should women be more involved in the creation and use of AI?
Women solve problems all day long, from the moment we wake up until the time we go to bed, from simple problems to complex ones. Having more women putting their energy into solving the big problems in the world will really change the way things happen.