AI is coming back for lawyers

More than a decade ago, lawyers were labeled an endangered profession, whose livelihoods were threatened by advances in artificial intelligence.

But the naysayers overtook themselves. While clever software has taken over some hardship of legal work – Search, review, and scour mountains of legal documents for nuggets of useful information – Employment in the legal profession has been growing faster than the American labor force as a whole.

Today, a new AI threat is looming, and lawyers might feel a little déjà vu. There are warnings that ChatGPT-style software, with its human-like fluency, could do much of the legal work. The new AI has its flaws, particularly its propensity to make things up, including fake legal citations. But proponents insist these are teething troubles in an emerging technology — and fixable.

Will the pessimists finally be right?

Law is seen as the lucrative profession that is perhaps most at risk from recent advances in AI, as lawyers are essentially word dealers. And the new technology can recognize and analyze words and generate text on the fly. It seems willing and able to perform tasks that are lawyers’ bread and butter.

“This is really, really powerful,” said Robert Plotkin, an intellectual property attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “My work and my career consisted mainly of writing lyrics.”

But if the past is no guide, the impact of new technology is a steadily rising tide rather than a sudden tide. New AI technology will transform legal practice and eliminate some jobs, but it also promises to make lawyers and paralegals more productive and create new roles. This came after the introduction of other work-changing technologies like the personal computer and the Internet.

A new studyby researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, concluded that the industry most exposed to the new AI is “legal services.” Another research report, of economists at Goldman Sachs, estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated. Only office and administrative work was higher at 46 percent.

Lawyers are just one profession on the path of AI advancement. A study by researchers from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80 percent of American workers would have at least 10 percent of their jobs affected by the latest AI software.

The legal profession has historically been identified as a mature target for AI automation. In 2011, an article in a longer series in The New York Times on advances in AI (titled “Smarter Than You Think”) focused on the likely implications for working in the legal profession. Your caption: “Armies of expensive lawyers replaced by cheaper software.”

But AI’s advance in law proved more measured. AI mainly identified, sorted and classified words in documents. The tools of technology served as auxiliaries rather than substitutes, and that may be the case this time as well.

In 2017, Baker McKenzie, a major international law firm, set up a committee to track emerging technology and set strategy. Since then, AI software has made steady advances.

“The reality is that AI has not disrupted the legal industry,” said Ben Allgrove, partner at the firm and chief innovation officer.

The rapid progress on large language models – the technology engine for ChatGPT – is a significant advance, Mr. Allgrove said. Reading, analyzing and summarizing are basic legal skills. “At its best, technology seems like a very intelligent paralegal, and it’s going to improve,” he said.

The impact, Mr. Allgrove said, will be to force everyone in the profession, from paralegals to partners making $1,000 an hour, to climb the skill ladder to stay ahead of technology. People’s work, he said, will increasingly focus on developing industry expertise, exercising judgment on complex legal matters, providing strategic advice and building trusted relationships with clients.

Technology has wiped out a large number of jobs in recent years, and not just robots taking over factories. Personal computers, productivity software and the Internet have made office work more efficient and replaced many employees.

According to an analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, clerical and supportive jobs, including secretaries, clerks, bill collectors and clerical assistants, employ 1.3 million fewer workers than in 1990. The Labor Bureau predicts a further declinewith 880,000 fewer jobs in these occupations by 2031.

“Technology is a driver, and there are big changes, but they tend to come gradually over a decade or more,” said Michael Wolf, department head of occupational employment forecasting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The current outlook of the bureau is that jobs for lawyers And Paralegal will continue to grow faster than the labor market as a whole. Mr. Wolf is closely watching the launch of the new AI software, but said it’s too early to assess the technology’s long-term impact.

Lawyers usually test the technology in test runs. The topics of data protection and client confidentiality are of crucial importance in legal work. The legal profession resisted the use of email until rules for handling information were established.

And the tendency for software models to invent things confidently is alarming – and an invitation to malpractice lawsuits – in a profession that depends on finding and weighing facts.

To alleviate these concerns, law firms often use software that runs on something like ChatGPT and is tuned for legal work. The tailor-made software was developed by legal tech start-ups such as case text And Harvey.

Load in a case’s documents and ask the software to formulate questions about the testimony, for example, and in minutes it will spit out a list of relevant questions, lawyers say.

“For the things it does well, it does them amazingly well,” said Bennett Borden, partner and chief data scientist at DLA Pipera large law firm.

Successful use of AI requires lots of relevant data and questions that are detailed and specific, Borden said. More open questions like the most important pieces of evidence or the most credible witnesses are still a struggle for the AI

Attorneys at major law firms have seen significant time savings on specific jobs and are looking to technology as a tool to make teams of attorneys and paralegals more productive. Individual practitioners see the technology more as a partner in practice.

Valdemar L. Washington, an attorney in Flint, Michigan, was selected last fall to test Casetext’s software called CoCounsel, which works with the latest ChatGPT technology.

Mr. Washington used the software in a lawsuit against the City of Flint alleging that residents were being overcharged for water, sewer and service charges. He uploaded more than 400 pages of documents, and the software quickly reviewed them and wrote a summary that alerted him to an important gap in the defense’s case.

The program did in minutes what would have taken him hours, he said.

“It’s a real game changer,” said Mr. Washington.

But how much the legal profession will change, and how quickly, is uncertain.

The new AI is a challenge to the status quo. Higher productivity means fewer billable hours, yet hourly billing remains the dominant business model in the legal profession. AI should increase the pressure on corporate clients to pay law firms for work done, not time spent. But senior corporate counsel—the clients—are typically former partners and associates at large law firms steeped in the same traditions.

“There is a huge opportunity for AI in legal services, but the professional culture is very conservative,” said Raj Goyle, a consultant to legal tech companies and a Harvard Law School graduate. “The future is coming, but it won’t be as fast as some predict.”