GenAI in Law: Enhancing Efficiency Without Replacing Expertise

3

October

2024

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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/

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Can Blockchain revolutionize the Insurance Industry? A Non-Profit’s Perspective

16

September

2024

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Just as card collections are being implemented on the blockchain as NFTs, there are also other industries that can capitalize from the adoption of blockchain, such as insurance, especially in developing countries.

Imagine you are a farmer in rural Africa, and you want to protect your crops against drought. Your options will be very limited as there are no or just a few local insurance companies operating in your area. Even if you buy one of the available policies and the drought occurs, the claim process is cumbersome and linked to tight reporting deadlines. Worst case scenario, you might even lose the documentation needed to submit for settlement (Adam-Kalfon et al., 2017).

To tackle this problem, insurance companies can use smart contracts via an underlying blockchain, which are also used to create NFTs, and offer blockchain-based insurance products to its customers. The smart contract automatically triggers the payout when the event encoded in the contract occurs. For instance, the insurance company sets a rain threshold of 3 months and if that threshold is surpassed, the smart contract triggers a pay-out event.

The Lemonade Foundation, one crucial stakeholder in the industry, already launched their blockchain-based crop protection in Kenya which allows farmers for as low as $0.83 to get their plot of land insured with a few clicks on their phone (Wininger, 2023).

When Prof. Ting Li asked the class who bought NFTs before, only three people raised their hand. Why is that and will the same happen to blockchain-based insurance products? There is a multitude of reasons which might explain the lack of adoption. For example, a lot of NFTs have to be bought via cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, older users tend to be less tech-savvy which creates a certain scepticism towards blockchain-based solutions. Nevertheless, I do not believe this applies to blockchain-based insurance products as users can pay in their local currency and the whole user experience runs on an app while having the blockchain-based infrastructure under the hood.

The figure below shows the types of architecture in a blockchain-based insurance industry.

References

Adam-Kalfon, P., PwC France, & El Moutaouakil, S. (2017). Blockchain, a catalyst for new approaches in insurance. https://www.pwc.ch/en/publications/2017/Xlos_Etude_Blockchain_UK_2017_Web.pdf

Smart Contracts in Insurance: A Complete Guide | ScienceSoft 🌐⛓️. (n.d.). https://www.scnsoft.com/insurance/smart-contracts

Wininger, S. (2023). Fighting World Hunger with Blockchain – Lemonade Blog. Lemonade Blog. https://www.lemonade.com/blog/lccc-world-hunger/

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