Every client asks us about AI’s applicability in the legal market.
The Unbiased Consulting team observes many law firms “playing” with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with lots of discussions and some, more limited, proofs of concept. While considerable chatter and “hype exists”, the material results are currently elusive,.
We see the use of Generative AI today spanning several law firm use models:
Leverage of the public internet:
First, currently there is sporadic leverage of generative AI (in the form of ChatGPT) by lawyers using the public internet. There has been significant activity with law firms setting policy and training to ensure that people do not disclose client specific or confidential information in their searches as that information becomes part of the public domain. Some firms have forbidden use of the technology by firm lawyers and users.
We are seeing mixed outcomes in leveraging the public internet as ChatGPT wants to provide the requestor with an answer, but the answers may not be real or accurate. Therefore, risk is great. We have all read some of news on lawyers attempting to use the new technology and then citing what has turned out to be erroneous or non-existent citations.
This all being said, we do not see many firms leveraging AI “prompt training”, to educate the firm’s lawyers on how best to use the technology to yield safer and better results. We think an opportunity exists in this regard.
Leverage of 3rd party AI leveraged legal software:
Second, we hear considerable industry “chatter” from software and technology companies publicizing their active use of generative AI in their products. We know that some of the major legal research vendors are leveraging the technology and seemingly almost every legal software provider is purporting to use AI as part of their technology. Quite frankly, most clients report that these solutions are still in their formative stages and not presenting “game changing” solutions, as of yet.
Leverage of internal law firm data and documents:
The third, more strategic use of generative AI, in our opinion, is to point the technology to the law firm’s own documents and databases. The ability for a law firm associate who needs to write a pleading or an opinion, leveraging curated and cleansed firm content, poses great possibilities – and it is that strand of generative AI that appears to be the most promising.
This being said, we think that most firms have not thought deeply about the curation required as well as the manpower, time and costs associated with cleansing their content and data. This will be a requirement to ultimately leverage the full power to the firm’s intellectual property using generative AI and other tools.
We believe that generative AI will eventually provide material efficiency and productivity improvements to our law firms clients. We recommend that all law firms place investments to familiarize and educate themselves on this quickly evolving technology.
Last, an important caution. We have worked with many client’s who are enamored with the technology. We recommend that clients not focus on how the can use generative AI as a technology solution. Rather they should focus on “use cases”, by role, experience, practice and client need/problem – to determine their needs for further efficiency, productivity, speed, value, quality, etc. Focusing on the business need, and then looking at how generative AI can do its part, will yield better results. Firms need to focus on client and internal improvement opportunities (on how to better utilize process and people). Technologies, like generative AI, are a potential enabler to process and organization improvement, not the other way around!
If your firm is contemplating its generative AI journey, we can help you focus on the improvements, while avoiding AI technology in a vacuum. For more information about Unbiased Consulting’s services, please visit our website at www.UnbiasedConsulting.com, email us at info@unbiasedconsulting.com, or call us at 312.967.6317.