Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the legal profession.
Lawyers are known for their conservatism, which is fitting for a profession that values preparedness, wisdom, and respect for precedent. However, the story of Steven Schwartz, a personal injury lawyer at the New York firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who used ChatGPT to prepare a court filing, may have caused some amusement. He relied too heavily on the AI chatbot, resulting in a motion filled with fabricated cases, rulings, and quotes, which Mr. Schwartz promptly filed after the bot assured him that the “cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases” (they were not and cannot be found). A tech-sceptic lawyer might conclude that the old ways are the best, but that is the wrong lesson. Blaming AI for Mr. Schwartz’s error-filled brief is no more logical than blaming the printing press for errors in a typed document. In both cases, the fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. AI is neither a fad nor an apocalypse; it is a tool in its infancy that has the potential to radically alter how lawyers work and how law firms make money. The legal profession is not the only field that can be said to have this potential, but few have such a clear use case with such a high risk. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards, while laggards risk going the way of typesetters.
According to Goldman Sachs, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by AI, more than any other occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Lawyers spend a significant amount of time scrutinizing tedious documents, which AI has already demonstrated it can do well. Lawyers use AI for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research, and data analytics. These applications have primarily relied on “extractive” AI, which extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about it…
2023-06-06 15:14:03
Link from www.economist.com
