Chess champion Garry Kasparov, famous for competing with IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, gave a speech at DEFCON 25 called The Brain’s Last Stand. In it, Kasparov said:

A weak player plus an ordinary machine plus a superior process will be dominant in the game against a strong player, a strong computer, and an inferior process.

For many years I have noted concordant observations of this phenomenon in the legal-technology sphere.

I feel the phenomenon merits a name, and not having seen one before now, I would like to call it “Kasparov’s Razor”.

This phenomenon, along with some other principles of human behaviour such as Parkinson’s Law, constitutes the fundamental long-term value proposition for my startup, Conductor.

Our bet is that in the legal-technology sphere, process-driven augmentation is superior to pure automation.