Ten Ways Generative AI Will Transform the Legal Industry

Have you heard? 

There is a new technology in town…generative AI. It has the potential to change how we work across industries around the world, and the legal industry is no exception. Already, we are bracing for the possibilities and the adaptation that will be necessary as Generative AI is integrated into Legal. While I do not believe Generative AI will replace lawyers, I do think it will change how lawyers work, how they are trained, and possibly how they bill for services.  

The following are possible legal applications for generative AI and the potential impact of each.

Task Efficiency: Everyone is excited about generative AI and the potential for increasing efficiency and productivity in various tasks. The opportunities are wide-ranging, from daily drafting of emails to helping draft work products or conduct legal research.  

Document drafting: Using generative AI to draft documents based on prior work product containing a legal department’s—or law firm’s—expertise is perhaps an obvious application of Generative AI. Corporate attorneys see benefit in using Generative AI to help with contract drafting. 

"With Generative AI, the preparation can be completed more quickly, resulting in lower client costs"

Indeed, we are seeing many contract drafting platforms that incorporate the capability to redline contracts and suggest revisions when compared to a standardized playbook. There are also potential applications for utilizing generative AI to evaluate and modify the terms of an agreement. For example, “re-write this agreement with more favorable terms for Party X.” Beyond specific use cases, generative AI can also assist with drafting emails, such as client updates. Attorneys practicing internationally might benefit from using generative AI to translate communications and documents.  

Legal Research: Legal research is an obvious area of application of generative AI. Indeed, the Casetext Co-Counsel offering took the legal world by storm in 2023, culminating in the $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters for incorporation into their Westlaw Purview legal research platform. Likewise, Lexis Nexis, another leading legal research platform, is offering Lexis+ AI. 

The potential efficiencies that generative AI offers for legal research are impressive. These platforms offer an advantage over commercially available platforms, such as Chat GPT, since the case law content against which the AI is applied is already curated and established. This alleviates the concerns around hallucinations (made-up content) that we have seen in some courts. While still developing and being tested by firms, law schools are starting to embrace these tools in training attorneys, and this may be the first area of significant adoption by law firms.

Data Mining and Analysis: Internal data mining is an application of generative AI with great potential. To be able to query, for example, our internal document management system to compile deal points or litigation activity before particular courts have tremendous potential marketing value, which can lead to business generation.  

New workflows: Generative AI will also result in changes to existing legal workflows that employ AI. In my opinion, the document review industry, which employs contract attorneys to review documents for litigation and due diligence purposes, will also need to evolve as generative AI takes hold.

E-discovery Document Review:  Generative AI will introduce the next phase of Predictive Coding, with the potential to greatly reduce document review fees, which have already been reduced with the introduction of TAR 1.0 and, subsequently, continuous active learning. 

By providing the document requests to the review platform, it can suggest (and rank) the likelihood of any given document in the review corpus to be responsive or not. Of course, human validation of the AI’s suggested responsiveness will be necessary, but the technology will further facilitate the review process and likely further decrease the cost of review. There are similar parallels to the use of generative AI in contract review, further supplementing existing extractive AI tools to enhance due diligence analysis in M&A deals.

Investigations:  Similar to E-discovery document review, generative AI has the potential to improve the investigative review process. By identifying the tone or topics in communications, discussions regarding the activity concerned can be flagged for further querying and summarization by generative AI tools. As a result, the investigative process is shortened by faster access to information. 

Generative AI tools are also able to connect information from disparate sources…think of tracing financial transactions. Once again, generative AI presents efficiencies, allowing for faster analysis and conclusion to an investigation.  

Data Privacy and Data Breach Response:  Yet another application uses large language models (LLM), of which ChatGPT is one, in data privacy and data breach review. The LLMs can be used to identify PII and PHI more accurately than regex searches allow. You can more quickly build a data breach response plan by linking potential PHI and PII to other information in documents. In a world where it is often necessary to respond rapidly to data breach notification requirements in various states and countries, this application of the technology is quite valuable. Using this technology to flag such content for remediation before a breach may have an immeasurable return on investment for vulnerable companies.

Fact Discovery:  Another area ripe for generative AI adoption is the discovery process. Imagine being able to query witness testimony to compile a summary of a particular issue in litigation. Or use it to draft witness interviews or deposition questions or prepare timelines of events in litigation. Compilation of this sort of information often takes many paralegal or attorney hours to review deposition transcripts or documents to prepare. 

With Generative AI, the preparation can be completed more quickly, resulting in lower client costs. Platforms such as Co-Counsel, HarveyAi, and e-discovery provider Reveal already provide such tools that enable this sort of investigation into documents and contracts.

Re-imagining Legal Service Delivery: Finally, this new revolution of AI technology presents the opportunity to re-imagine legal service delivery, much like other industries that are likely reimaging the delivery of services relevant to them.

New Opportunities for Legal Roles and Revenue Generation:  Advising clients on the implementation and use of generative AI presents a new way to advise clients while creating new revenue. Developing expertise in this area may be a career path some attorneys want to consider. Likewise, as this new technology is adopted, new career paths are possible: data analysts, prompt engineering trainers, and knowledge management attorneys who help train custom models for use by their firm or legal department. I am sure I am only touching the tip of the iceberg on possible new careers!

Billing for legal services:   For many years, there has been discussion in the legal industry regarding the death of the billable hour. It has yet to happen. However, with Generative AI possibly greatly reducing the amount of time an attorney needs to generate work product, now may be the time we begin to see the transition to more value-based billing. Only time will tell, of course, but generative AI seems to be a likely disruptor of legal service billing.

Lawyer Training:  Last but not least is the impact on lawyer training. Lawyers will need to learn new ways to prepare content, new ways to query and conduct legal research, and new ways to work. Skills may focus more on critical analysis and quality control of computer-generated first drafts. Greater efficiencies in preparing work products may result in a need to further perfect business development skills to supplement reduced billable hours. Lawyers will need to adapt and evolve with the changes generative AI will bring to the legal industry…and to the industries of the clients they represent.

As you can see, I believe generative AI can disrupt the legal industry. 

And, as the legal industry has, over many years of technological evolution, it will again adapt, improving how legal work is performed and delivered. One might say these are exciting times…I do think so!