In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), more specifically generative AI, is making waves across industries, and the legal sector is no exception. The “24 Voices for 2024” report, a comprehensive guide to trends in AI and automation that are creating seismic change, offers invaluable insights into this transformative shift.

The report, which brings together the perspectives of 24 industry thought leaders, explores three main areas of discussion: The rise of AI in legal, putting AI into practice, and AI’s impact on professionals. This blog post will dive into the first area, “The Rise of AI in Legal,” drawing on the wisdom of these experts and industry research to shed light on the exciting developments in the legal industry. ‍

‍The Use of Generative AI Will Increase in Legal

Generative AI has enormous potential to accelerate efficiency and improve effectiveness in the legal industry. It can be used in eDiscovery, legal research, document management and automation, due diligence, litigation analysis, improving internal business processes, and more.

Lawyers have shown an unprecedented level of interest in recent advancements in AI because of generative AI’s wide popular appeal and potential to improve their work lives and job satisfaction. A Thomson Reuters Institute survey of lawyers revealed that 82% of respondents feel positive about generative AI’s potential use in the legal profession, and The National Law Review reports that 36% of lawyers say that AI tools will be mainstream within the next five years.

The fact that generative AI is designed to work with text and uses natural language makes it particularly well-suited to knowledge work generally and legal work specifically. In a panel discussion at the NetDocuments 2023 Inspire customer conference, Greg Siskind, Co-Founder of Siskind Susser Immigration Lawyers, described generative AI’s appeal: “What do lawyers do all day long? We research, we read, we digest information, and then we draft. AI can make our day-to-day work easier in a lot of respects because it can do a lot of those tasks.”‍

LLM Capabilities Are Evolving

Generative AI tools, built on large language models(LLMs), present outsized opportunities, and some challenges, for the legal industry in that there are currently limits on how much text can be analyzed at one time. But that’s changing rapidly. What makes LLMs unique is that they can understand vast amounts of text and also generate new content based on their derived interpretations of human language. Examples of LLMs include GPT-4, BERT, and LaMDA.

LLMs are well-suited to a wide variety of legal tasks since much of that work involves processing information and generating pleadings, timelines, reports, letters, contracts, etc. — tasks that LLMs were specifically created to handle. By incorporating LLMs into legal tech tools, lawyers can improve efficiency to reduce overwhelm and make tedious work less taxing.

LLMs are currently being used in a variety of ways and have the potential for additional use cases as they develop further. A few ways they can be used include contract review and drafting, detailed analysis, comparison, and summarization, memo generation, case law research, and due diligence automation.

Kim Konotchick of Microsoft, emphasizes the unique opportunities AI presents for the legal industry, stating, “The legal industry has large documents. Very unique and intricate language in those documents, and that’s perfect for today’s large language model and generative AI.” ‍

Prepare for the Rise of AI

The genie is truly out of the bottle and not going back! The rise of AI in the legal sector is a transformative shift that is set to redefine the industry. As generative AI capabilities and tools continue to evolve, it promises to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of legal services, making it an exciting time to be part of the legal profession.

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