AI + Law = It's already Here Let's Go
How Law can Cope and Must Thrive in an AI World, Enhancing Intelligence
Here comes AI into the Law space. Spoiler alert: it’s already here.
Lawyers should be making their own plan right now to not only cope, but to thrive, in a new AI + Law world. There is already no going back.
Law Practice has already been somewhat hobbled from the pandemic and all its corresponding impacts which are peculiar to the law:
virtualization,
ZoomWorld,
micro and macro economic pullbacks,
need for economy now,
migration (domestic and international),
commercial real estate apocalypta,
germophobia and irl allergy,
wide-spread distrust of “the experts”,
rise of alternative products online,
DIY cultural phenomenon,
“everything is ‘free on the Internet’”,
…sometimes experience of Law as inimical to you where you are…
There is a general sense that the public at large, and this includes leaders at leading organizations vis a vis the Law is “over it.”
The truth be told, Law Practice had already been suffering a reduction in efficacy by many generations of repeated conventions and formulaics which people have become increasingly wise to:
Sit down, shut up, hold my beer, let me handle this.
You can’t. Only I can.
Pay your retainer or I don’t do anything.
I will spend as much time as I need, and I will bill you based on this time.
[See 2, above]
I’m smarter than you, but I won’t share all the ways how.
Yes it sounds like a speech I am giving you.
Do you like my fancy loafers/briefcase/watch/gleaming offices?
You don’t need to know. I need to know.
No, I don’t need to know all/any that you wish to tell me. I just need to know what I need, and I ask you.
M-F 9-5 only.
You care deeply about this result. Yet we can’t win them all. [See 4 above].
You can’t even find me, because you do not even know enough to look for. It is among the scant area where people still use “Phone Books.”
Templates, templates, templates. Form, forms, forms. “How we do it here.”
Your win is my bragging right. Your loss we don’t talk about.
Enter #AI. A massive now funded and growing technological global ecosystem which crunches and discerns data into digestibles; some great, some good, some toxic. Yet it will not stop. Where the 1990s witnessed the growth and development of the Internet, the 2020s with AI birth an unknown number of big small and in between, both public and private — data and information internets.
(I say “enter” even though AI goes back many years to the 1950s, w legendary enigmatical computer thinking and codebreaker pioneer Alan Turing — has since 2000 seen massive expansion—Yet few would doubt 2023 as a “breakthrough” year.)
The Law, if one thinks about it, is nothing other than #data. Data sets of various configurations with patterns modes and repeatables. Yes, professional expertise and judgment cannot yet be replicated.
And for the humm drum tasks of basic legal understanding, which the present model largely leaves clients bereft of, this is a fair game open terrain. Law is data. People should have access to justice and the law, however.
In the majority the Profession greets AI with large measure of fear, paranoia, and of course proprietary attitude. They are smart enough to see the threat. Sometimes smart enough to see the risks (2020 Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca and “The World’s First Robot Lawyer” and Florida voids similar in 2021 w TIKD). Often inventive enough to see the promise, and things are underway.
Innately cautious, these seeing the promise from many large law firms investing lots of money in AI are mostly doing so for internal purposes only; distrustful of trusting either the client or lawyer-client interface.
A “First Major Legal Dispute” between an unstoried behemoth of AI and a storied behemoth of media is in front of us; placing high dollar “for billions” visibility for issues around copyright specifically, and AI integrations more generally. NY Times v. OpenAI [Addendum, do not sleep on ROSS]
In the overall, being good lawyers in the traditional sense, they are most focused on how AI can be used to maximize billing and minimize the time spent. Nobody can blame them for doing what they do. Lawyers will lawyer. Turf protection is innate. Dispatch of even possible enemies inchoate in the training and experience.
Yet somehow we get the sense of great things coming at the collision of AI and the Law and not completely understood, nor even controllable in historic professional contexts.
AI is running through the field like a wild horse alighting on whom offers an apple slice. She will be always free, even if tamed in some circumstances. Many of the wild horses will outrun the tamed ones. More people will get kicked and bucked; lawyers and laypeople alike. Many more will just stay out because horses inherently scare them. The horse will keep galloping through where it goes (Law or whatever), as AI races to its stated finish line of AGI (“Artificial General Intelligence.”)
Lots of nebulous risk propaganda out there does not help for the scared. Entrusting one’s life or matter or fate to something called “artificial intelligence” feels, well, artificial. Artificial can be dangerous when we ourselves are trying to be authentic and not synthetic.
Personally, I prefer to call it “EI” for ‘Enhanced Intelligence.’ Less scary and I think says more about what AI is, what it promises for the Law, how we should look at it, and what it can be done for the Law Practice; lawyers and lay people alike.
AI is not coming to the Law. AI is here yesterday.
It is time for Law and lawyers to hitch its wagon to AI for the profession and the public good.