Moving faster: the emergence and implications of AI in the legal industry

As the chief technology officer of Safelink, Karl Anderson, puts it: “anyone, in any industry, who primarily works with words and language will have the option to embrace better tools that supplement or supercharge their work. Lawyers, in particular, have a lot to gain."

Becoming more productive through AI sounds appealing, but what will it look like?

And how do legal professionals feel about this technological landslide themselves?

Promising applications

There are some AI applications that can help lawyers, paralegals and associates in their daily work.

Looking at the capabilities of GPT-powered AI today, there are four immediate applications:

• summarisation, where advanced language models are proving capable of delivering abstractive rather than extractive summaries that concisely convey the most important parts of the information
• conceptual search allows for a more comprehensive retrieval of information by finding results whose meanings are close substitutes to a given query
• document construction, where the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) can be used to create documents to order, with far more power than template engines of the past. Through limited amounts of fine-tuning, standard constructions can be interwoven with particulars, the firm's knowledge base and even a preferred tone of voice
• legal assistants that offer chat-like interfaces to drive other actions, including interrogating matter information, knowledge bases and legal resources, running searches, and constructing documents

Karl says: “one of the powerful applications is to help people to distil information and find answers faster.

"This will be particularly useful in litigation, where lawyers can use AI-enabled tools to comb through large amounts of data, such as emails and other electronic documents, to identify important information quickly.

"In turn, this helps speed up analysis, support early case assessment and reduce the time spent on manual review.”

In addition to litigation, LLMs will open the door to far more powerful corporate law contract review tools.

Karl says: “instead of manually reviewing each contract, corporate lawyers can use AI to quickly identify potential issues, such as non-standard clauses or missing provisions in shareholder agreements. This saves significant time and resources while reducing the risk of errors.”

“I’ve spoken with many lawyers over the years, and they tell me that legal research can be time-consuming and arduous,” he says.

“Applying AI-powered tools that make finding facts, statutes, and precedents faster will be compelling in legal research. Even tooling that makes it less likely that you miss an idea has an obvious benefit.”

Will security concerns ruin the party?

Looking at the results from the survey, part of the hesitance in the legal sector around the adoption of GPT will be grounded in security concerns.

This is understandable, as there’s a lot of mystery surrounding how AI models handle data and store information.

Anyone using GPT-powered tools, of which there’s an ever-increasing number, should be aware that the information they enter is being sent to OpenAI's servers in the United States, often via intermediaries and that the information could be retained along the way.

This raises questions. Does the data include personally identifiable information? Does it include commercially sensitive information?

Has your client agreed to their information being processed in this way?

Do all the providers in the chain provide terms and technical security measures that protect information sufficiently?

Karl says: “One solution to the security challenges is to work with an experienced technology provider who can help apply LLM technologies while still respecting regulatory requirements and confidentiality obligations.

"We’ve been working with lawyers for over a decade and understand the concerns, so now we’re well-placed to find a path to unlocking these new technologies while over-delivering on the security standards that we all expect.”

He adds: “Right now, we’re in a wild west phase, where many people have access to all sorts of new tools in a very raw and unfiltered way. It enables people to paste in any kind of information and interact with systems like ChatGPT that could reveal confidential information.

"The immediate response to this should be to offer guidelines and train staff on the safe use of these tools, if they’re allowed at all.

"As applications mature, what we’ll end up doing is refining the interfaces so that people have narrower ways to interact with LLMs.

"This makes it less likely that confidentiality breaches will occur and more likely that the tools will be used correctly and that the results will be of high quality.”