Here is a quick look at how a friend of mine uses generative AI to support her legal work at a big law firm. While AI doesn’t yet have the ability to provide reliable case law or specific judgments, it shines in simplifying and summarizing lengthy legal texts. Here is how her process usually works:
When she gets a request from a client, she inputs the questions into a GenAI such as Claude. It provides a general overview and suggests which laws might be relevant, which is usually a pretty good starting point. Then, she dives deeper into legal databases, looking for specific judgments and articles. After identifying useful sections, GenAI helps her craft a clear, concise summary to send back to the client. Legal workers should be aware of the potential risks when dealing with GenAI to support their workflow. Firstly, you should always make sure to omit sensitive client information from your prompt to avoid potentially breaking confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. In addition, as with other GenAI outputs, you should check for hallucination to avoid damage to the firm’s reputation. Finally, consider that GenAI is usually trained on data that is often more than a year old, which can make it difficult to use in a fast-changing environment such as the legal field.
One of the major advantages is that AI can simplify complex legal language, making it more digestible for non-lawyers. This makes communication with clients much easier and helps them understand their legal situation more effectively. Furthermore, GenAI could have the potential to dramatically reduce working hours for lawyers in big law firms, with a lot of them currently working as much as 80 hours a week, leading to numerous burn-outs (Bottorff, 2024). In short, generative AI tools have become a great tool for efficiency, but it still needs a human touch to ensure accuracy and depth.
References:
Bottorff, S. (2024, February 7). How to survive big law Hours | LawMatics. Lawmatics | Engage, Convert, Nurture, Grow • Best in class Client Intake and Marketing Automation for the modern law firm. https://www.lawmatics.com/blog/how-to-survive-big-law-hours/
