Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, argues that firms profit by “having armies of young lawyers to whom they pay less than they charge clients”. As Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School notes, “You can be a smaller, leaner specialised firm and have the capacity to process these sorts of cases.”īillable powersSecond, AI could change how firms make money. Now a single lawyer or small firm will be able to upload these documents into a litigation-prep AI and begin querying them. In large, complex lawsuits, these firms tell dozens of associates to read millions of pages of documents looking for answers to senior lawyers’ questions and hunches. First, it could reduce big firms’ manpower advantage. Much as it made little sense for lawyers to insist on doing legal research in libraries once the vastly larger and more easily searched databases of Westlaw and LexisNexis were a click away, when a critical mass of firms embraces generative AI, more will follow.ĪI has the potential to transform the legal profession in three big ways. After news of Mr Schwartz’s debacle broke, for example, a federal judge in Texas told attorneys appearing before him to file a certificate attesting that they either did not use generative AI at all or that, if they did, they checked the final result. Yet if these challenges can be tackled-and they can, with better technology and careful humans in the loop-then the misgivings of the doubting 49% may pass. Many worry about “hallucinations” (as AI boffins refer to chatbots’ tendency to present falsehoods with aplomb, as in Mr Schwartz’s case) and about inadvertently feeding information subject to attorney-client privilege into algorithms. One recent survey found that 82% of them believe generative AI can be used for legal work but just 51% thought it should. As Pablo Arredondo, creator of a generative-AI “legal assistant” called CoCounsel, explains, using it “removes the tyranny of the keyword…It can tell that ‘We reverse Jenkins’ and ‘We regretfully consign Jenkins to the dustbin of history’ are the same thing.” Allen & Overy, a large firm based in London, has integrated a legal AI tool called Harvey into its practice, using it for contract analysis, due diligence and litigation prep. Part of that power can be used to improve legal research and document review. “Generative” AIs such as ChatGPT are far more powerful. These applications have largely relied on “extractive” AI, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents. Lawyers use AI for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. Lawyers spend an awful lot of time scrutinising tedious documents-the sort of thing that AI has already demonstrated it can do well. Laggards risk going the way of typesetters.Īccording to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by AI, more than in any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards. But few combine as clear a use case with so high a risk. The legal profession is hardly the only field about which one could say that. For that is what AI is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancy-and one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money. In both cases, fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. Blaming AI for Mr Schwartz’s error-filled brief makes no more sense than blaming the printing press for mistakes in a typed one.
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