Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to radically transform the practice of law. Although the way lawyers work has a long history of technology-driven change, the recent introduction of systems based on massive language models, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4, signals the emergence of widely available technology capable of carry out sophisticated research and writing tasks with a competence that previously required highly trained people.
Law firms that take advantage of new AI technologies will be able to offer services at a lower cost, with greater efficiency and with greater likelihood of obtaining favorable results in litigation. Law firms that do not harness the power of AI will not be able to remain cost-competitive, will lose clients, and will see their ability to attract and retain talent weakened.
Let’s think about one of the most time-consuming tasks in litigation: extracting the structure, meaning and relevant information from a huge set of documents generated during the discovery phase. AI will greatly accelerate this process, because it will carry out in seconds a job that without it could take weeks. Or think about writing petitions to present in court. AI can be used to quickly draft drafts, cite relevant case law, present arguments, and rebut (or anticipate) the opposing party’s arguments. Human input will still be necessary to produce the final draft, but the process will be much faster with AI.
More generally, AI will greatly improve the efficiency of lawyers in drafting documents that require a high degree of customization, a process that has always taken a significant amount of lawyer time. Examples include contracts, the many types of documents presented to a court in litigation, responses to interrogatories, summaries for clients of developments in an ongoing legal matter, visual aids for use in the trial and presentations to attract new clients. AI could also be used during a trial to analyze the trial transcript in real time and provide lawyers with information to help them choose which questions to ask witnesses.
These opportunities will lead to the creation of new legal technology companies. An example is Casetext, which appeared in early March 2023 on the American cable television network SNBC’s Morning Joe and recently announced an AI legal assistant called CoCounsel. Said CoCounsel, which is powered by OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, allows an attorney to ask the same types of questions they might ask a junior associate, questions like “Can you research what the courts in this jurisdiction have done in cases that present fact patterns similar to those of the case we are working on?” Casetext is part of what will undoubtedly become a rapidly growing ecosystem of legal technology companies providing AI products based on massive language models.
There are also opportunities for the use of AI in the more automated delivery of legal services. Legal and policy frameworks will need to be updated to facilitate innovation in this area, while identifying and protecting against associated risks.
For lawyers, getting the most out of AI tools will involve much more than pressing a key. AI is most effective when used to complement human skills, and those who learn to leverage that collaboration well will get the most out of the new tools.
This will require the development of new skills, such as knowing how to choose the right tool for each specific task, developing the right queries and assessing the relevance, quality and accuracy of the answers (and then updating the queries as necessary), and also being capable of synthesizing overall results into a coherent and actionable form. Lawyers will also need to be vigilant to ensure that any use of AI tools is done with due attention to protecting confidentiality.
Law firms will have to institute new training so that practicing lawyers can adapt to the new environment. Law schools will need to update their curricula to ensure that students learn to use new writing and research tools, as these skills will be in high demand by recruiters.
AI also has the potential to dramatically expand access to legal services, which incur exorbitant costs for many individuals and small businesses. As the Center for American Progress has written, “promoting equitable and meaningful access to legal representation in the American judicial system is critical to ending poverty, combating discrimination, and creating opportunity.”
Thanks to AI, starting and pursuing litigation is much less expensive. It is now possible, for example, to automatically generate a thousand-word lawsuit against automated calls with a single click. Crafting a well-written complaint will usually require more than just a single click; but, in some scenarios, not many more. Those changes will make it much easier for law firms to expand their services to lower-income clients.
Of course, reducing litigation costs also has a downside. There will be people who will take advantage of the ease of automatically generating lawsuits and rapidly flooding the court systems of multiple jurisdictions with artificially worded unwarranted lawsuits. These plaintiffs will count on the fact that, given a certain number of lawsuits, a sufficient number of defendants will rush to reach an agreement, which will end up being quite profitable. Laws regarding reckless litigants may need to be updated to prevent such abuses.
Even with the widespread adoption of AI, lawyers will not cease to be vitally important. AI cannot make a convincing presentation to a jury. Technology cannot fully weigh all the factors involved in the many strategic decisions, large and small, that are made throughout any litigation. It cannot in any way replace the human element of customer relationships. And a computer cannot play a leadership role that motivates a team of lawyers to do their best.
In short, it will be a mistake to use the extraordinary advances of AI to minimize the importance of the human element in the practice of law. However, it will be an equally serious mistake to dismiss the role of AI, which will lead to a radical reshaping of the landscape for providers and users of legal services.
John Villasenor is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Center for Technological Innovation (Brookings).
