The growing partnership between AI and lawyers ushers in a new era of enhanced capabilities and efficiencies. Think of lawyers as experienced mountaineers, skillfully navigating treacherous legal terrain, adept at identifying pitfalls, and charting an ethical course toward favorable outcomes. AI is like a cutting-edge GPS device, providing detailed maps, real-time guidance, and warnings of potential obstacles along the way.
AI boosts lawyers’ analytical skills, while legal professionals provide essential human qualities like sound judgment, ethical practices, and legal expertise. This collaborative partnership changes legal work forever as it progresses through four growth stages.
1. Creating A Balanced Foundation
Legal professionals are most commonly at the initial stage of AI adoption, using AI-backed tools for legal research, contract review and analysis, and document creation. According to a few surveys, nearly three in four lawyers expect to integrate generative AI into their legal work in the coming year.
AI needs your guidance to provide the most relevant results. You must tweak AI prompts and continually refine AI-generated outputs. And you cannot rely solely on AI’s results without thoroughly reviewing and verifying their accuracy.
It’s a balanced, foundational relationship. You understand legal intricacies and craft strategies to overcome challenges. AI excels at analyzing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns and trends, and providing insights that would otherwise remain hidden.
2. Enhancing Legal Specialization
Lawyers can customize AI tools to suit their practice areas, such as corporate law, employment law, or intellectual property. Training AI models with data specific to a legal practice area or industry helps ensure AI outputs are more accurate and relevant to client needs.
Your role now is to help train AI models, ensuring data includes specific terminology, case law, and relevant regulations. You must also dissect and explain complex legal labyrinths to help AI understand the stakes.
You are a strategic interpreter, ensuring AI systems adhere to facts, legal principles, and ethical considerations. AI, in turn, enhances your capabilities with real-time legal updates, early issue detection, personalized client services, and more.
3. Guiding AI Expertise
AI systems can tackle sophisticated challenges, including predicting litigation outcomes and analyzing complex contractual arrangements. To do this, AI systems employ multiple AI models to coordinate advanced workflows and analyze large data sets.
Your role is to design and oversee AI-driven workflows, from selecting appropriate AI models to ensuring outputs are accurate, relevant, and ethically sound.
You become an AI navigator, bridging the gap between AI’s analytical prowess and the complexities of the law. You interpret and contextualize AI’s findings within a legal framework. AI learns to grasp the intent behind legal documents, the nuances of legal reasoning, and the ethical implications of legal decisions.
Together, you enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of legal practice and safeguard the legal system’s integrity.
4. Empowering The Enterprise
As AI becomes integral to law firms and legal departments, its use extends across practice areas, uniting fields such as mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property rights. This integration further streamlines operations to deliver even more comprehensive legal insights and enhances client service.
You set the strategic direction for the enterprise-wide application of AI. This involves identifying where AI can create the most value. You are also an ethical guardian overseeing AI’s impact on client interactions and ensuring its use meets ethical standards. From start to finish, legal decisions always rest solely with you.
You provide AI with context and guidance and ensure stakeholders use AI insights responsibly and ethically. AI significantly enhances legal practice’s efficiency and effectiveness and elevates legal services’ quality.
When lawyers and AI join forces, they form an unstoppable team. It is a balanced partnership that will help us build a future where justice is served with greater speed, precision, and fairness. You can explore the four stages of the lawyer+AI partnership more fully in The AI Co-Pilot 4-Stage Maturity Model.
Olga V. Mack is the VP at LexisNexis and CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on Visual IQ for Lawyers, her next book (ABA 2023). You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.
