Isn’t it great when you get to end the week inspired? That’s exactly how I was feeling at the end of Centre for Legal Innovation's Generative AI (GAI) Roundtables with Legal Consultants on 24 March 2023 – such a fabulous conversation!
Huge thanks to Alison Laird for facilitating this for us and to our amazing contributors!
Fourteen big takeaways for me from this session:
1. ChatGPT is providing a good starting point - the “end of the blank page” - for different use cases but, with the strong caveat that what’s “generated” needs to be verified and checked so the outputs can be trusted and are NOT amplifying misinformation.
A couple of the use cases for ChatGPT mentioned:
a. Law students/early career professionals, using it to produce a summary of the law so they can quickly identify next steps.
b. Likewise it provides a language-friendly preliminary overview of the law for clients (if those clients have access this technology).
2. GAI will be able to do a number of paralegal/early career lawyer tasks better, cheaper and faster. However, this also removes these tasks as the building blocks to more complex tasks. Does this mean early career lawyers will be less skilled or, are these skills no longer needed because the tasks are now being done differently? The answer has significant knock-on consequences, especially for legal educators.
3. ChatGPT/GAI could provide strategic opportunities for sole proprietors/small law firms across a range of things like helping remove the cognitive load of admin tasks to replacing paralegals/early career lawyers for some types of work/tasks. An example provided was Adieu.ai which describes itself as “robot paralegals for family law firms.”
4. On the flip side, using GAI to remove cognitive load could also increase it! For example, legal workers spending more time focusing on complex matters without relief, could incur even greater mental fatigue. These mental health and wellbeing issues need to be thought through, resolved, and managed.
5. GAI used effectively and efficiently will support lawyers wanting a hybrid role in law firms - it will free up time and allow them to divide it more readily between practising as a lawyer and working as a NewLaw careerist.
6. In law firms and legal departments, especially those undertaking end of matter debriefs, GAI information collation on similar matters could be combined with predictive analytics to provide greater certainty for costs, risk management, and inform capability development/deployment.
7. In the face of GAI, how, where, and when do lawyers add value as humans? For example, are we prioritising skills like curiosity, listening, relationship building, and empathy in recruitment, compensation, promotion, etc.?
8. GAI will be the catalyst to rethink the relationship between knowledge and experience in legal practice. Do our clients need legal advice from us (experience) or an information kit/product (knowledge) they can download? Are we selling what our clients want, the way they want it?
9. GAI could be the catalyst for consultants (inside and outside) to rethink their roles and refocus on being dot identifiers and joiners. Knowing how to get the most out of GAI (the right questions to ask) from knowledge and experience then using data to find the best match of digital/human capabilities then collaborating on implementation, will support mutually beneficial solutions for lawyer/client pain points.
10. GAI has the potential to significantly assist in closing the A2J gap, especially when thoughtfully and effectively combined with humans but, there are still big issues to resolve like client access to tech, confidentiality, and privacy.
11. GAI is expensive. It is important that its use is fully democratised and it remains readily accessible.
12. The increased efficiencies realised by GAI will conflict with those legal practices billing by the hour.
13. Failing to use GAI or tech, where affordable and readily available, may also raise issues of professional conduct/ethics.
14. Many intellectual property issues have yet to be identified and resolved with ChatGPT. One thought was whether or not royalties could be paid to creators when ChatGPT used their content, similar to how musicians have been remunerated per stream by Spotify. This is one of many open questions/issues which will be best resolved collaboratively.
Can’t wait for our roundtables next week with legaltech developers/technologists and law school leaders – woohoo!
About the Author
Terri Mottershead is the Executive Director of the Centre for Legal Innovation (Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific) (CLI) at The College of Law. Terri collaborates internationally with leaders of legal businesses supporting them in identifying trends, developing strategies, and transforming their capabilities and practices to deliver legal services/products in the new legal ecosystem. She is the instigator, designer and developer in chief of CLI’s global initiatives, networks and programs including the Legalpreneurs Lab and its podcast series, The Legalpreneurs Sandbox. Prior to joining CLI, Terri was a practising lawyer, founded start-ups on three different continents, and established or led the in-house talent management departments for global firms and associations in Asia and the US including Lex Mundi, the Inter-Pacific Bar Association (IPBA) and DLA Piper LLP (US).