Welcome to Straight Talk, our series where Wolters Kluwer’s Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets, and Jennifer McIver, associate director of legal operations and industry insights, discuss how generative AI (GenAI) is impacting law firms.
This month, Jennifer and Ken discuss attorneys’ expectations when it comes to AI, including its accuracy, capabilities, and more. Here’s what they had to say.
What do attorneys expect of AI? For instance, how accurate and reliable do they expect it to be?
Ken: The expectations right now are very mixed. In the near term, attorneys seem to be taking a measured approach to AI. Firms want to better understand AI and adopt it in repeatable ways. They’re paying close attention to how to do that and have been very meticulous about how to integrate AI into their daily workflows. Law firms, in particular, have to be very careful to comply with client requirements, and client views on using GenAI are evolving. “AI Governance” is a new topic, and transparency around when GenAI is used is one area that is causing a more measured approach.
Given that, do attorneys expect AI to be able to take on some of the larger, more value-added tasks that humans have traditionally managed?
Jen: I think expectations have tempered a bit. Attorneys understand that there is and always will be a place at the table for them, but AI can help them do their jobs better.
In fact, I see a lot of corporate attorneys and firms using AI for smaller use cases. They’re looking for efficiency gains for tasks that normally take a lot of time but don't require a lot of thought or strategy.
For example, let’s say it's part of an attorney's job to disseminate information about new regulations. What does that mean for the company? What does that maybe mean for a sales team? What are their dos and don’ts?
Attorneys will not necessarily use GenAI to learn the new regulation; that’s something they’ll do on their own. They might use the technology to summarize the regulation, though, and use that summary as a starting point to communicate the impact of the regulation through email, collaboration platforms, and so forth. Since they know the regulation, they can pick out so-called hallucinations or incorrect information and fine-tune the summary without having to take the time to write it from scratch.
Those small use cases are truly effective. They help attorneys get the process started so they can turn a product around more quickly and get important information out.
Ken: I completely agree, Jen. An email that I think should take around 30 seconds might take up to 15 minutes. There are a lot of intangible small things that add up to something very big. Anything that solves that issue is going to be of use to attorneys.
Do these smaller expectations equate with a greater comfort level with AI?
Jen: I still think there’s some fear. That’s probably stemming from putting in a prompt and receiving a response that doesn’t seem quite right. That’s not necessarily the technology’s fault, though; it might have more to do with the learning curve required to enter information or phrase a question in a specific way.
I like to equate that with the early days of online legal research tools. When people first started using online search tools, they would receive responses that weren’t exactly perfect. You could never rely on the first response you got. It was always an iterative process. Now, most attorneys are perfectly comfortable and only use online search tools for legal research. They’ve gone along that journey and matured with the technology.
I think that’s where GenAI is going to be. The technology will mature, but so will the people using it. Attorneys will become more comfortable with things like LLMs and become adept at using them.
How do you think we’ll get to that point?
Ken: Learning how to prompt and knowing how to ask the right questions is going to be key. That’s going to take some trial and error, but eventually, I think it will become ingrained in every attorney. Once that happens, I think the fear, uncertainty, and doubt will begin to subside.
Jen: I’m also seeing more in-house legal teams using AI for knowledge management solutions, including FAQs, chatbots for asking legal questions, those kinds of things. Those are all low-risk. If someone doesn’t get the answer they desire, they can easily jump in, add more context, and move on.
Right now, how should attorneys view GenAI and its place in their workflows?
Ken: They should look at GenAI as another tool in their toolkits. It’s not the end all be all, but it can be effective when incorporated with other applications or as an ingredient in new applications.
For example, VitalLaw features an AI assistant. You can search for legal briefs and, upon getting your search results, use the tool to refine your knowledge. For instance, you can ask, “What are the things that I should do to comply with this law?” We’re seeing customers save ten, fifteen, twenty-five minutes in research, just from this product. I think that’s great.
Jen: I agree with Ken. AI is a very powerful tool, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of its use in legal technology—not just in the products we sell but in the service we provide.
Case in point: we just rolled out a customer service solution for law firms called ELMer. It provides firms with quick, AI-generated answers on topics ranging from how to use our system, how to reset a password, or why a bill failed to load. The answers are simple, but they lead to really big efficiencies. It’s an example of how AI is helping us help our customers and is a great showcase of the power of AI to deliver useful information while saving time.
Check out our previous blog in the Straight Talk series, where Jennifer and Ken discuss how attorneys are really using AI.
