The prom king and queen winner for 2023 seems to be artificial intelligence. Everyone is talking about it, many are praising it, others are vilifying it, but, nonetheless, it’s in the vernacular now. There’s an AI race, many startups and established companies are looking to integrate AI and there seems to be a role for AI to play in many industries, revolutionizing the way we work, live and interact.
There are legal research service platforms and databases like LexisNexis and Westlaw that have had some degree of ML for searching case law for about 30 years. It’s said that lawyers need to be fastidious and have to go over long documents, do research and do due diligence. This may be where AI could come in, extracting insights from text and understanding the context of the content.
The standard argument for AI is that it would do all the boring and monotonous tasks, while humans could do more thoughtful, creative, important and exciting tasks, like exercising prudent judgement in complex legal matters and meting out strategic guidance. Crucial provisions could be pinpointed, the review process could be organized and more agreements could be scrutinized efficiently in a shorter period of time. So, there could be patterns and insights uncovered that the human eye may not catch and so, with better time and efficiency, a lawyer or a legal team could make well-informed decisions with meticulously-analyzed data.
That being said, the world may not be ready for a robot lawyer to represent you in court, so the human touch may still be indispensable in the legal landscape. There’s an AI platform called Harvey that could help lawyers with legal tasks, like litigation, compliance and due diligence. Is it named after Harvey Specter of Suits? Who can tell? It’s been called a copilot for lawyers, having received backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund and the lead of Google AI, amongst other angel backers.
An algorithmic analysis may not suffice in that case. As of now, it seems like AI could be an enabler for lawyers and those who learn to leverage it well would gain the most out of it.
