Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” IBM’s updates to its Watson Discovery Service enable dear counsel to learn all there is to know about the data at hand using the search and e-discovery tools.

Artificial intelligence’s ongoing advances were part of our “Top 10 Legal Trends in 2017.” We cited IBM’s first artificially intelligent lawyer, ROSS, as a prime example.

Per a recent Legaltech News report, IBM followed up on its legal research platform with the launch of Watson Discovery Service at the end of 2016. IBM intends to advance its AI platform’s e-discovery and search technology with the expansion of its discovery service and launch of the Watson Company Profiler.

So what can Watson do? It “can comprehend language and data on an almost human level.” Developers can leverage IBM’s discovery service to implement a “machine learning model” in their search tools, which can then “find relationships in structured data and unstructured data, and categorize and index such data into a searchable database.”

In short from IBM, per Legaltech News, a legal team “can quickly extract relevant details from dense legal briefs, past legal proceedings and other lengthy documents.”

The Watson Company Profiler, meanwhile, is a “pre-built knowledge repository that searches through Dun & Bradstreet Inc.’s commercial database and other data sources to extract actionable information on a variety of corporations.” It’s intended to assist M&A attorneys gain important market intelligence.

Holmes also once cried impatiently, “Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.” Surely, he would have been impressed with Watson’s modern-day data work.