We sat down with Gareth to discuss his innovations, and ideas on the horizon – both near and far.

1. You have just returned from the FT Innovative Lawyers APAC awards night in Hong Kong, how was that?
   
   It was an extraordinary experience – it's certainly not something I do every day! It was very really interesting to meet such an impressive and diverse group of legal innovators – not only from Australia, but throughout the Asia Pacific region and from London as well.
   
   Needless to say, there is a lot going on.
   
   I should say, though, that I believe that, as a firm, we are measuring up well against some of the best law firms in the legal innovation space.
2. Tell us about Definition Checker, why did you develop this app in particular?
     
   Lawyers spend an enormous amount of time manually reviewing and checking lengthy documents - such as contracts, advices, prospectuses - yet can still miss things due to the sheer size and volume. To help, I developed Definition Checker – which finds definitions, gives easy access to them and checks for problems (e.g. duplicate and unused definitions, misspelled defined terms, undefined terms, prompts and dates).
   What is particularly innovative is the use of Natural Language Processing, or NLP, to facilitate an automated review against, and inclusion of clauses from, a precedent or sample..
   
   The app has now been released to over 2,500 users in the firm and the feedback has been extraordinary.
3. What other innovations have you worked on while at MinterEllison?
   
   You may be familiar with Chronology Builder – an app that puts the evolving factual matrix of a case at a lawyer's fingertips. It tracks events, people, documents and their interrelationships.
   
   Litigation lawyers deal in facts – not merely documents – and often very complex facts, but there are few tools that help lawyers keep track of them. E-discovery tools don't cut it, because they are document centric.
   
   It is in widespread use within the Workplace group especially and has been used for hundreds of matters.
   
   I also co-developed an experimental app called Dismissal Advisor, which provided automated advice about disciplining employees – considering unfair dismissal, breach of contract, victimisation etc. The advice was detailed, with risks, options and a 'how to' on implementing the preferred option, including letters, scripts, deeds etc. The app won the Firm's Neota Hackathonwas built using the Neota Logic platform.
4. What innovations are you working on at the moment?
   
   A lot! And some of it is secret!
   
   Suffice to say, I am closely looking at putting Natural Language Processing capability on lawyers desktops; at expert systems and chatbots and prospectus verification.
   
   And Definition Checker V2.0 is not far away either.
5. What technology will dominate the legal sector in the next ten years? [i.e. will it be in AI, chatbots, automation etc?]
   
   Natural Language Processing is incredibly important, given lawyers deal in words and documents. There are a growing number of legal technology apps which incorporate forms of Natural Language Processing – for things like recognising clauses, categorising text, extracting keywords and even summarising text.
   
   What isn't so widely known is that many of these apps are based on well-known and documented algorithms – which is part of the reason for the burgeoning number of apps.
   
   You can, with a little bit of coding experience, even write your own natural language processing apps in Python, using publicly available libraries.
6. Where do you get your inspiration from?
   
   I was a (professional) computer games programmer in a former life. Due to a combination of circumstance, bluff and luck, I managed to get a job in a computer games programming studio (Melbourne House), while I was at high school back in the 1980s. I then worked there through high school and university.
   
   Melbourne House had a worldwide reputation – developing some of the iconic games of the 80s, such as the Hobbit and the Way of the Exploding Fist. The skills that I developed as a teenager and young adult remain with me today.