Adel Sheikh, Senior Legal Project Manager, Eversheds-Sutherland
The pace of change in the legal industry over the last 10 years or so has been phenomenal. We’ve seen business concepts and disciplines such as design thinking, legal operations, and project management become integral to the legal profession. Today, CEOs from business backgrounds run law firms, a departure from the lawyer-only leadership model of the past.
On the technology side, there is software for almost any functionality one can fathom – all aimed at making lawyers more productive, enabling firms to work quicker and more profitably while making the service affordable for clients. AI has further accelerated this trend.
Then last year, Gen AI landed in earnest, sparking unprecedented excitement (and an unprecedented scramble to understand what to do with it!).
The promise of Gen AI today is unparalleled. There is now a technology that creates and delivers tangible outputs and usable content. Gen AI’s potential as a “game changer” is no exaggeration, even as the industry grapples to work out how best to apply and operationalise the technology. Innovation teams in law firms and in-house legal departments are energised as they navigate the technology’s complexities to figure out how best to adopt it for business advantage, backed by senior stakeholder sign-off.
The industry buzz is palpable. “Are you using Gen AI?”, “How are you experimenting with the technology?”, “Have you worked out use cases for your firm?”, and so forth are commonplace conversations among innovation leaders in meetings, industry events, and conferences.
A lot of firms are rolling out Copilot and undertaking internal trials to determine the best use cases for Gen AI. Where is the low-hanging fruit? How do we utilise the technology while protecting client data? How do we (and can we) train Copilot on our data? Is our data accurate and structured? These are all serious considerations.
Likewise, law firms’ clients share this excitement too.
Increasingly, clients are including the use of Gen AI in their RFPs. They are actively interested to know their advisors’ AI strategy, how the firms intend to safely adopt Gen AI and how this will impact their external legal spend. The technology promises better budget utilisation by eliminating the costs of administrative tasks and enabling more focus on high-value activity.
A common analogy likens Gen AI to a confident first-year trainee. The tool generates good first drafts of presentation decks, lease reports, and contracts. Similarly, it’s useful for summarising data or client meetings. Although while the work appears competent at first glance, like a new trainee, it still requires close oversight, correction, and hand-holding, due to lack of experience.
Legal work, across all disciplines, is underpinned by process. Therefore, the true magic of Gen AI will happen when it intuitively and organically integrates into processes at the right stages to reduce or eliminate administrative tasks.
While generating content, sending reminders, drafting summaries, and creating template-based documents, would no doubt be helpful, the technology’s real value would emerge in areas such as due diligence. Arguably, in such transactions, due diligence often forms the bulk of the work – investigating risks based on the lender's risk appetites, analysing and summarising reports, managing compliance, and so forth. Gen AI could significantly reduce the time-consuming but essential communication and the back-and-forth that typically takes place across multiple parties through the transaction lifecycle.
As law firms explore use cases and seek to increase adoption rates, it is arguably technology vendors who will be the first to make this kind of “in-situ”, “in-process” adoption possible. Indeed, many have already made progress. For example, document review, document management and knowledge management solution providers are seamlessly incorporating Gen AI to enhance the functionality of their offerings. This approach is the least disruptive too. The new Gen AI component is an inherent part of the solution and offers flexibility in usage.
This approach resembles a Lego model. Technology vendors have already created a core ‘Lego’ model and are now simply plugging in a new piece of Lego (i.e. the GenAI tool) to further align the product with the user’s needs.
Gen AI offers transformative potential in legal services delivery in a meaningful and effective manner. Lawyers, trainees, and paralegals, stand to benefit from efficiency and productivity gains, allowing them to focus on the more exciting and stimulating work. Similarly, the technology promises to minimise or eliminate the administrative work, enabling these legal professionals to focus on client priorities – timely communication and accurate advice, expertise, and superior service.
Contrary to the “job loss” narrative, Gen AI is creating a whole new sub-industry in legal. The growth of tech-focused, legal operations and project management roles, for example. Both Gen AI and broader AI developments spell positive news for the legal sector, with exploration of these technologies only just beginning.
Gen AI will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of legal. From streamlining processes to enhancing client services, the potential applications are vast, varied and still broadly undiscovered. While challenges remain in terms of implementation and ethical considerations, the excitement surrounding Gen AI is well-founded.
Law firms and legal professionals who embrace this technology thoughtfully and strategically will likely find themselves at the forefront of innovation in the field. As we move forward, the key will be to balance the efficiency gains of Gen AI with the irreplaceable human elements of legal practice – judgment, empathy, and complex problem-solving.
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Views expressed are my own and not representative of Eversheds Sutherland