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 and corporate legal departments.
This month, Jennifer and Ken discuss the many reasons why attorneys should embrace AI and how the technology positively impacts their daily lives.
We’ve talked about why attorneys might be apprehensive about AI, but what about the things they love about it? What are you hearing from some of your customers about how they’re using—and embracing—AI?
Ken: Many attorneys are “embracing the hallucination,” especially attorneys who are turning to AI for creativity that will help them build a legal argument that makes a certain point. Even inaccurate responses can prompt the lawyer to think of ideas they may not have otherwise considered. The technology can be like a sparring partner for effective brainstorming.
AI is also good at summarizing or manipulating content. For instance, an attorney can ask AI to distill a document filled with legalese into a one-page summary, put the text into wording that a client can understand, or translate it into a different language. Those are the things that I think attorneys are starting to embrace.
Jen: GenAI is also helpful when writing initial drafts. I don’t know about you, Ken, but it takes me forever to start a draft. GenAI is great at helping attorneys start their written communications. Also, often attorneys need to understand and review new regulations and disseminate their findings to other departments. That’s where GenAI shines. They can edit those communications and summaries as necessary, but having the technology get them going is a big efficiency savings.
Ken, you mentioned “embracing the hallucination.” Can you expand a little more on what you mean by that?
Ken: Let’s say an attorney asks a chatbot how they should argue a particular point or prompts the AI for some recommended counterarguments. The AI might return a response that isn’t correct, especially if it’s a normal chatbot as opposed to, say, a service containing vetted legal information. But that’s still powerful because it gives the lawyer the ability to think about things in a new way or uncover issues they may not have thought of on their own.
There is a danger, though, in relying too much on the information the AI provides. You hear stories of lawyers who have cited a fictitious case in which AI hallucinated. The citations exposed that the attorneys never read the cases, as they didn’t exist, yet submitted filings to courts that referenced the fictitious cases. We need to distinguish between that scenario and the idea of using hallucinations as fodder for new ideas because the former scenario is dangerous. It’s what originally caused a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and we don’t want to go back to that.
Now that attorneys are becoming more comfortable with the technology and embracing it, what do you think will happen next?
Jen: As attorneys become more comfortable with GenAI, we’re going to see simplistic use cases like creating initial drafts evolve to more complex workflows. Lawyers are going to incorporate AI into everyday tasks to make those tasks a little bit easier to manage and help save time wherever it makes sense.
Things are a little different for legal operations professionals or corporate counsel. They can take work that everyone’s doing, create processes around that work, and use data to inform their decision-making. We’re going to see enterprises continue to use AI to synthesize and make sense of their data so they can make strategic decisions around everything from law firm selection to budgeting and more.
Ken: AI will also help attorneys achieve a better work/life balance. Using it to create first drafts, for example, is a huge time savings. Lawyers are going to be excited about getting to see the kids more often and going home a little bit earlier.
I also think the savvy associates who know how to use this technology well and within their firms’ policies are going to be top performers. They’ll get their work done more efficiently and really set themselves apart.
So, what do you guys think? Is AI a game changer for young associates fresh out of law school?
Jen: Today’s graduates shouldn’t be considered first-year associates. They don’t have to do the rote work traditionally given to first years. Instead, they need to be able to reason and understand things on the level of a second- or third-year associate. For them, it’s not just about getting things done faster—it’s about developing a somewhat advanced understanding of legal theory very quickly. AI will help by giving them insights they may not have otherwise been able to grasp on their own.
Ken: This reminds me of when calculators became a thing. “Oh my gosh, how is anybody going to be able to do math? What’s going to happen to our society if people don’t learn long division?” I think it’s the same thing with lawyers and AI. You have attorneys who have cut their teeth on a lot of brute force rote work to learn what it means to practice law as opposed to what they learned in school. And now, it may be possible for attorneys entering practice to learn how to practice law differently with the aid of AI, and they may be able to do it in a shorter time.
If law schools teach young attorneys how to manage a small army of bots or AI assistants, those students are going to be able to leverage the technology on day one. They might learn how to accelerate their ability to manage and practice law a little differently, even creatively. AI will give them and all other attorneys the ability to work not just faster but better.
Check out our previous blog in the Straight Talk series, where Jennifer and Ken discuss what attorneys expect of AI.
