Caroline Sweeney, Director of Knowledge Management and Innovation, Dorsey & Whitney
Caroline Sweeney, Director of Knowledge Management and Innovation, Dorsey & Whitney
Have you heard of it?
There’s a new technology in town…generative artificial intelligence. It has the potential to change the way we work in every industry around the world, and the legal industry is no exception. As generative artificial intelligence becomes integrated into the legal field, we are ready for a variety of possibilities and necessary adjustments. While I don’t believe generative AI will replace lawyers, I do think it will change how lawyers work, how they are trained, and perhaps even how they are billed for their services.
Here are the possible legal applications of artificial intelligence and the potential impact of each.
task efficiency: Everyone is excited about generative artificial intelligence and its potential to increase efficiency and productivity in a variety of tasks. Opportunities range from day-to-day drafting emails to helping draft work products or conducting legal research.
Document drafting: Using generative AI to draft documents based on previous work products that incorporate the expertise of a legal department or law firm may be an obvious application of generative AI. Corporate lawyers see the benefits of using generative artificial intelligence to help draft contracts.
“With generative artificial intelligence, preparation can be completed faster, resulting in lower costs for customers”
In fact, in contrast to standardized playbooks, we see that many contract drafting platforms have the ability to revise contracts and propose modifications. There are also potential applications for using generative artificial intelligence to evaluate and modify agreement terms. For example, “Rewrite this agreement with terms more favorable to Party A.” In addition to specific use cases, generative AI can also assist in drafting emails, such as client updates. Lawyers practicing internationally may benefit from using generative AI to translate communications and documents.
legal research: Legal research is an obvious application area for generative artificial intelligence. In fact, the launch of Casetext Co-Counsel took the legal world by storm in 2023, eventually being acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million and incorporated into its Westlaw Purview legal research platform. Similarly, Lexis Nexis, another leading legal research platform, also offers Lexis+ AI.
The potential efficiencies that generative AI offers for legal research are impressive. These platforms have an advantage over commercial platforms such as Chat GPT because the case law content applying artificial intelligence has already been curated and established. This alleviates concerns about hallucination (fictional content) that we see in some courts. While still being developed and being tested by firms, law schools are beginning to adopt these tools to train attorneys, which may be the first area of widespread adoption by law firms.
Data exploration and analysis: Internal data mining is an application of generative artificial intelligence that has huge potential. For example, being able to query our internal document management system to compile transaction points or litigation activity in a specific court has huge potential marketing value, which can lead to business growth.
new workflow: Generative AI will also lead to changes in existing legal workflows that employ AI. It seems to me that as artificial intelligence is developed, the document review industry that employs contract attorneys to review documents for litigation and due diligence needs to evolve as well.
Electronic Discovery Document Review: Generative AI will introduce the next stage of predictive coding, with the potential to significantly reduce document review costs, which have already been reduced with the introduction of TAR 1.0 and subsequent ongoing active learning.
By providing document requests to a review platform, it can suggest (and rank) the likelihood of response or non-response for any given document in the review corpus. Of course, human verification of responsiveness to AI recommendations will be necessary, but the technology will further facilitate the review process and potentially further reduce review costs. There are similar parallels to the use of generative AI in contract reviews, further complementing existing extractive AI tools to enhance due diligence analysis in M&A transactions.
investigation: Similar to eDiscovery document review, generative AI has the potential to improve the investigative review process. By identifying the tone or topic in communications, discussions of related activities can be flagged for further query and summary by artificial intelligence tools. Therefore, by obtaining information faster, the investigation process can be shortened.
Generative AI tools are also able to connect information from disparate sources… think about tracking financial transactions. Generative AI once again demonstrates efficiency, enabling faster analysis and conclusion of investigations.
Data Privacy and Data Breach Response: Another application that uses large language models (LLM) in data privacy and data breach auditing is ChatGPT. LLM can be used to identify PII and PHI more accurately than formal expression searches. By linking potential PHI and PII to other information in documents, you can develop a data breach response plan more quickly. The application of this technology is extremely valuable in a world where rapid responses to state and national data breach notification requirements are often required. Using this technology to flag such content for remediation before a breach could result in immeasurable return on investment for vulnerable companies.
Facts found: Another area ripe for generative AI adoption is the discovery process. Imagine being able to query witness statements to compile summaries of specific issues in litigation. Or use it to draft witness interviews or deposition questions or prepare a timeline for litigation events. The compilation of this information often requires a paralegal or attorney to spend considerable time reviewing deposition transcripts or preparing documents.
With generative artificial intelligence, preparation can be completed faster, thereby reducing customer costs. Platforms such as Co-Counsel, HarveyAi and eDiscovery provider Reveal already offer tools to conduct such investigations of documents and contracts.
Reimagining legal services delivery: Finally, this new revolution in AI technology offers the opportunity to reimagine what legal services offer, just as other industries may reimagine the service delivery associated with them.
Legal roles and new opportunities for income generation: Advising clients on the implementation and use of generative artificial intelligence provides a new way to advise clients while generating new revenue. Developing expertise in this area may be a career path some attorneys want to consider. Likewise, with the adoption of this new technology, new career paths become possible: data analysts, just-in-time engineering trainers, and knowledge management lawyers who help train customized models for use by corporate or legal departments. I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of possible new careers!
Legal services billing: The legal community has been discussing the death of billable hours for years. This hasn’t happened yet. However, since generative AI has the potential to significantly reduce the time it takes attorneys to generate work product, now may be the time we start to see a transition to more value-based billing. Of course, only time will tell, but it seems likely that generative artificial intelligence could disrupt legal services billing.
Lawyer training: Last but not least is the impact on lawyer training. Lawyers need to learn new ways of preparing content, new ways of querying and conducting legal research, and new ways of working. Skills may be more focused on critical analysis and quality control of computer-generated first drafts. Improving efficiency in preparing work products may require further refinement of business development skills to supplement reduced billable hours. Lawyers will need to adapt and evolve with the changes that generative AI will bring to the legal industry…and to the client industries they represent.
As you can see, I believe generative AI can disrupt the legal industry.
And, as the legal industry evolves through technology over the years, it will once again adapt to improve how legal work is performed and delivered. One might say this is an exciting time…and I certainly think so!
