Why legal innovators want to talk about AI

Until recently, Tim McDonald would have been quick to use the phrase “transformational” to describe the real estate platform developed by his team at law firm Lander & Rogers. It enables construction client company personnel to generate automated contracts and use workflow approvals, electronic signatures and risk assessment options on all projects they undertake.

“No one would have thought that such complex processes could be automated,” says McDonald, a partner of the Australian company.

But lawyers’ opinion of their platform changed in late 2022, as generative AI, the rapidly growing technology that can produce new content such as text, graphics or literature, attracted widespread attention.

San Francisco-based developer OpenAI had just released a trial version of its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which can answer questions and output text in natural-sounding language.

“We all immediately dropped what we were doing and started playing it,” recalls McDonald. “We started texting each other and realizing ‘this is actually quite good’ — and this [was] just a trial version.”

Within days, McDonald had concluded that any failure to learn to involve him in his team’s day-to-day work would mean “we would fall behind.”

OpenAI, which first won the backing of software giant Microsoft in 2019 – now amounting to billions of dollars – it has since introduced other iterations of its online tool. And other tech rivals, including search engine giant Google, have joined the race to unveil generative AI products.

Few tasked with developing forensic technology doubt they will incorporate generative AI into future ventures, and many intend to modify their existing designs. McDonald plans to add built-in chat capabilities powered by generative AI to the automated contract generation platform, noting that “it will happen very quickly.”

Sara Rayment, who left Australian law firm Sparke Helmore five years ago to found legal services firm Inkling Legal Design, says companies are already eager to explore the potential effects of generative AI. Legal design aims to redesign legal systems and documents used by lawyers, to make them more generally understandable.

He founded Sydney-based Inkling to fill the gaps – “cognitive diversity” – in the mutual understanding that too often emerges between lawyers and clients.

Lawyers often express concerns about sharing their knowledge to help customize AI tools

The company uses techniques borrowed from psychology and marketing to train law firms and internal lawyers to communicate more empathically and effectively. “Everyone sees and processes information differently,” she explains.

One of Inkling’s goals is to prevent clients from assuming that lawyers’ advice overemphasizes risks, and then later blames them for any negative outcomes.

Since ChatGPT first captured public attention, Inkling has been advising law firms on the adoption of Generative AI. This includes helping them measure the quality and quantity of results when they use it, versus what might be delivered by lawyers who don’t use it.

Still, lawyers often express concerns about sharing their knowledge to help customize AI tools, Rayment says. And they are concerned with making skills more available to a wider audience at a lower cost by “scaling their intellect.” Therefore, they often want to restrict access to their teams.

But the law firm Allen & Overy has released a generative AI tool to about 3,500 lawyers across its practice, including those in 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, says David Wakeling, head of the markets innovation group at Allen & Overy. Overy.

Before ChatGPT captured the public imagination, Wakeling’s team helped Allen & Overy lawyers working with financial services clients based in the Asia-Pacific region develop a self-service investor tool, called SubscribeMatrix, to a bank customer. The tool allows the bank to streamline the underwriting process when launching new investment funds.

By the end of last year, however, Wakeling’s team, backed by the law firm’s senior management, had turned its energies to developing a custom generative AI tool. Wakeling had learned of the planned implementation of ChatGPT through a contact at Stanford University and immediately put the technology to the test.

“I thought it was amazing,” she recalls.

An expert must check the output very carefully

After that, the rest of the team tested it, followed by other technophiles who were early adopters of the company. This February, Wakeling announced a partnership with Harvey AI, whose Harvey platform is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology, and proclaimed that Allen & Overy’s lawyers “will deliver faster, smarter, more cost-effective solutions to their clients “.

But Wakeling’s awareness of Harvey’s limitations and how often he provides “nonsense” as well as help tempers his enthusiasm for generative AI.

“An expert has to check the output very carefully,” he warns. Allen & Overy has instituted protocols to prevent Harvey from coming out, including errors that can be common in generative AI that hasn’t been customized with controls and monitoring.

Wakeling also plans to integrate Harvey’s capabilities into SubscribeMatrix and other platforms developed at the company.

At Lander & Rogers, McDonald notes that the costs of investing in generative AI will likely deter only a few companies. “It’s going to be the easiest return-on-investment case ever,” he argues. “He’s so capable of doing things that normally – and perhaps, unfortunately – [are done by] young lawyers and paralegals.