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AI and Their Future in Law

| April 6, 2024

Let’s be real for a second AI is now everywhere! You’re talking to a customer care AI chatbot, you’re uploading reference pictures of your preferred clothing, and you find AI everywhere.  

Similarly, the field of law has also witnessed the mass integration of AI. AI is now a hot topic to spark a debate amongst us- can AI replace lawyers?  

Are you also on the same bandwagon of thinking the same? Well, join us as we unravel the deepest intricacies of how AI can replace us or not in the future!  

What is Open AI and ChatGPT?

Before we unravel the knots of AI and its role in replacing our jobs, let’s see what OpenAI and ChatGPT are all about.  

OpenAI is an autonomous system that outperforms any humans in any economic work. They are tools that can perform human activities in less than half time.  

ChatGPT on the other hand is an AI-powered chatbot created by OpenAI that primarily responds to your open-ended text queries. They reinforce changes and are trained to learn from human feedback. In order to make ChatGPT feasible, different human AI trainers converse as users with this AI assistant and rank their responses. This, in turn, teaches the chatbot to reply properly.  

ChatGPT has now upgraded to the GPT-4 model, which is now unavailable for public access. However, you can upgrade it by subscribing to it for $20 per month. Upgrading to this version would also give you access to DALL-E. DALL-E is a picture creation model that can generate high-quality images via text prompts.  

The Current State of AI in Law

With the passing time, AI is now excelling to mimic human functions seamlessly. According to a survey in 2022, 12% of legal professionals now depend on AI tools to streamline their legal functions.  

Generally, they are using it to automate different types of tedious tasks. They generally use it for legal research, document review, and even contract analysis.  

Legal professionals have said that AI has significantly helped them in reducing the time frame of different time-consuming tasks. NLP algorithms help the lawyers to access relevant information at a go. Additionally, AI chatbots are a great avenue to come up with sometimes accurate legal information. This offers a significant convenience for different routine inquiries.  

However, AI might not be completely useful in some cases. The legal profession generally requires extensive research and data analysis. Since most of our work deals with critical thinking skills and strategy with proper problem-solving abilities, AI is not very handy in these cases. Our work deals with interpreting different nuanced principles which is sometimes difficult for AIs to work on.  

The human element therefore plays a significant role in understanding the emotional and moral decisions of different legal matters. These help in building strong client relationships and negotiating with proper agreements. This is something that is even beyond the control of AI.  

The Advantages and the Disadvantages of AI

AI is well-known to augment your capabilities and maintain an efficient work procedure. However, there are certain things that need to be kept in mind that determine its perks and pitfalls. Let’s see what they are:  

Advantages

Time efficient: Starting with the most obvious point, AI is very time efficient. The legal field is filled with repetitive and mundane tasks that easily fill up your day. Be it researching legal precedents, using AI would be a much more feasible solution to this. With AI you can easily automate this work process and complete your work in no time!  

Productivity: AI helps in streamlining different procedures that are overall helpful in streamlining legal functions. Trained NLP algorithms help in identifying patterns with different and vast amounts of datasets and identify all the relevant information at an astonishing speed.  

Elevates your work: If you use sophisticated AI for your legal work, it will automatically augment and streamline the overall work procedure. These AI tools are handy when it comes to drafting different legal documents and analyzing contracts. It also speeds up your routine legal tasks and allows you to focus on better work that can only work with human judgment.  

Disadvantages

Inaccuracy: Sometimes while using AI you often use misused source materials and get factual errors in your legal documents. These are some of the most common downsides of using AI. Additionally, compounding these challenges with technologies like ChatGPT also doesn’t provide authentic sources from where they collected the information from. This is why, sometimes, as lawyers, we struggle a lot to understand the authenticity of information.  

Ethical concerns: Before you use any AI for your work, you should always look at its ethical considerations. Sometimes issues like data privacy and security alongside potential issues of misuse can foster a risk of bias and discrimination.  

Strategic challenges: There are simply some human activities that AIs can’t even try to replicate. While AI can process and analyze data, but it doesn’t possess the necessary critical thinking skills for reading and understanding people. Moreover, humans are ace at working with incomplete information, AI is just as poor to reason with it.  

AI plays a major role in streamlining legal education. It’s changing its delivery and is helping future lawyers to successfully get through law school.  

Many law schools have evolved their curricula and included the usage of AI training and other technologies. This is now playing a profound role and equipping law students with the necessary skills they need to be better in the changing legal landscape. Be it repetitive tasks or understanding accuracy, AI is a new dimension in the overall legal education scenario.  

With the impact of AI on legal education, students are now finally graduating with different skills that are making them very competitive in the legal job market. They’re now entering the workforce with their newfound knowledge of constructing critical legal arguments and even stand out as someone who is well-aware of modern technology.  

How Lawyers Use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT has now transcended from just being an AI chatbot to something more. It is now getting deployed in several different ways. ChatGPT is also constantly improving for bettering our daily activities.  

ChatGPT has now excelled in creating legal ChatGPT to streamline their overall legal procedure. It also acts as a great support for legal clients. Like Harvey AI, it has been now showing prominent results in enhancing the legal system.  

Even though AI augments the work that lawyers do, they do not replace the lawyers and their legal capacity. Here are some predictions we have that are appropriate to us and are going to significantly change the legal industry.  

Regulatory Landscape

Since AI now is a very prevalent name in the legal profession, there is even going to be a better and greater need for new rules and guidelines for AI. It would ensure the safety of the tool and would manage it ethically. As a lawyer, you must keep necessary tabs on this regulatory landscape and follow it up to see it evolving in the future.  

Accessing Justice

These AI tools will potentially increase justice accessibility and make legal services a more affordable and accessible way. This reduces time in completing complex tasks and hence AI can even exacerbate different existing inequalities widening the justice gap. It also reduces any form of bias in the inherent data sets.   

Changing Firm Structure

AI will be majorly responsible to enhance and change the overall structure of the law firms. The smaller law firms would even have access to the same kind of AI-powered tools as their large law firm counterparts. AI would help the legal fields to become much more accessible and affordable. The legal field might even create new forms of legal service providers that would be enhanced especially by generative AI.  

Reasons Why AI Won’t Replace Lawyers

Even if we constantly worry about AI replacing our jobs, here are some top 3 reasons why AI won’t be replacing us anytime soon. They are:  

Limited Amount of Accuracy

AI models are primarily trained on massive amounts of text searches of what they’re previously told. So, they are trained only to create plausible results. Not all generative AI techs prioritize being accurate or coming up with the proper latest information.  

Increased Risks

8 out of 10 managing partners have prescribed risk concerns about generative AI. The concerns primarily arise from the inaccuracies present in the industry that influence the overall decision-making model. Besides AI runs the risk of not respecting confidentiality and other privacy and security concerns.  

Final Thoughts…

So, coming to the question we posed in the beginning, is AI going to replace us, lawyers? While it might reshape the overall legal profession, it is highly unlikely to replace us with AI.  

Instead of making us obsolete, AI would be a great way to enhance our work. If we use them effectively, it would empower us to work with greater accuracy.  

So, to answer your question, we hope this blog was helpful and informative for you. Are there any detail we missed? Let us know!

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Titas Ghosh Chaudhury
Titas Ghosh Chaudhury

Titas is a lawyer with a penchant for writing. In her leisure hours she likes to read books and collect Pokemon plushies and stay updated with different law judgements.

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