90's film aficionados will recall a scene in the teen film Clueless where the protagonist Cher helps her lawyer father prepare for a massive legal court case during a big overnighter. Her task is to go through a mountain of printed documents with a highlighter - highlighting every time a name is mentioned. She muddles up the date-sorted piles, and chaos ensues.
It's boring, tedious work that, while vitally important, is monotonous. It was a training wheel task of many legal professionals in the earliest stages of their careers—until now.
Today, AI and machine learning can automate the most mundane, commoditised tasks in due diligence, document handling, discovery, and litigation. For example, AI tools can summarise judgments, help collect arguments, and create the first draft of lawsuits and other written submissions.
While there's plenty of debate around the merits of AI in legal decision-making, there needs to be more around what the use of AI means for law as a profession. Law is a sector that traditionally relies on junior staff spending long hours doing mundane work as a rite of passage — both in terms of gaining foundational skills, respect, and knowledge. Take away the grunt work, and what does it mean for skills acquisition and professional development?
I contacted legal tech startups and legal professionals to find out.
AI trained on legal materials save time and improves accuracy
UK company Robin AI automates and speeds up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts and extracting information from across entire contract repositories through simple search. Its legal copilot can cut the time it takes to review contracts by 85 per cent.
According to Richard Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Robin.AI:
"Our job at Robin AI is to do the extremely time-consuming work that requires the lowest strategic input, and no one else wants to do it.
It's wrong to consider this work foundational. It's just work no one wants to do.
Reading 10,000 pages of documentation regresses your career progression because it's pretty disparaging work."
Robinson highlights that people are not good at pouring through thousands and thousands of pages of documents, looking for a needle in a haystack.
"Because they're tired, bored, they miss things, they get hungry, their performance is different, depending on whether it's 12 am or 1 pm. But computers don't have any of those problems. And now AI is actually better than people at these types of tasks."
According to Dan Fox at Johnson Hana, a firm using AI to process large volumes of data to aid early assessment and document review, agrees,
"The work that trainees do is being shrunk and being absorbed by machines; we talk about freeing yourself from the work that no one went into law to do and freeing yourself up to do more strategic, higher-value work that provides greater benefit to the firm and its clients.
People are getting into more analytical elements of their careers earlier on, which we will see mirrored on the legal side.
Can you form foundational skills relying on AI?
However, former Shearman & Sterling lawyer and CEO and General Counsel of Bittrex Global Oliver Linch, believes that law firms are in real danger of hollowing out the junior and mid-level section, resulting in fewer lawyers and less investment in skills acquisition.
"You'll still need someone for the partner to shout at. But you can get that down from, say, ten to two people, with more senior staff doing quality control.
However, too many firms are going down a dangerous route. And I don't think they've quite realised the implications of what they're doing."
According to Robinson, AI can enable less experienced professionals to have the power of much more experienced professionals.
"You don't get a ton of leverage from these tools if you're a 15-year partner. But it can help you move a bit faster up the ladder - done well, AI basically provides a 5-year career boost."
But Linch contends that, "If you want to be doing those funky, zany, innovative market-changing deals, you need to know what you're doing first. And there's just no way, there's just no substitute for having spent those miserable hours, though they might have been in the weeds of these deal docs so that you know the protocol side like the back of your hand."
"I've seen it happen, where you have inexperienced supposedly senior people without the foundations kind of making stuff up."
All of a sudden, you've now got a whole mid-level and senior cohort that is in any real sense, inexperienced and kind of lucky to be able to get a job."
But how much time should juniors at law firms dedicate to foundational tasks such as rote learning and search, which AI can better perform?
To be clear, Linch does not foresee a spiral death match between juniors and AI but rather the importance of using AI as an opportunity to grow the industry as a whole.
Linch highlights a lack of retooling within legal firms, asserting, "There's no one really learning how to use AI, not just to do what the junior associates used to do, but how to make it better, how to innovate, how to actually use these tools to do things that we could never even imagine."
He admits that most of the lawyers he talks to use AI already "and hope their bosses never find out. They've got chat GPT open on their screen."
Law firms can capitalise on AI by transparently adopting privacy-centric software and robust safeguards and oversight to demonstrate their commitment to client data security.
"If you went to a client and you said, 'Hey, look, here's how we've integrated this AI model into our working system. Here are the benefits it produces for you. Here are the protections we put in place to preserve your confidentiality." Most clients I know would be delighted."
Fox agrees, asserting that those who resist the advantages of AI could be left behind:
"Two things are currently key to the perceived value of a law firm. One is the experience that the firm has built up in terms of the individuals who are working there, their user experience, and what they've gathered over the course of their careers. The other is the reputation of the firm and perceived expertise in the advice they can provide.
As we move into a more tech-enabled legal space, even advisory firms will see the value they can create and advertise.
Firms that are smart enough to make the jump will get out in front, and those who end up on the back foot will face a competitive disadvantage."
Can AI restore the law sector's lost trust?
Speaking of reputation, done well, AI adoption could also significantly enhance the law sector's public perception.
According to Robinson:
"The legal profession is designed to serve the community. And I believe in the legal industry, that's why I started the company.
It used to be that lawyers were the most trusted people in society. And now we're some of the least trusted people who perceive us as greedy, as rapacious, mean, corporatist, as not being on their side. So, if you think about the profession through the lens of the consumer, the legal profession has not been serving them for a very long time.
AI gives us a chance to chart a different course."
Image: Freepik.
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