Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law - The Economist   

LAWYERS are a conservative bunch, befitting a profession that rewards preparedness, sagacity and respect for precedent. No doubt many enjoyed a chuckle at the tale of Steven Schwartz, a personal-injury lawyer at the New York firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who last month used ChatGPT to help him prepare a court filing. He relied a bit too heavily on the artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot. It created a motion replete with made-up cases, rulings and quotes, which Mr Schwartz promptly filed after the bot assured him that the “cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases” (they were not, and cannot). Lesson learned, a tech-sceptic lawyer might conclude: the old ways are the best.

That is the wrong lesson. Blaming AI for Mr Schwartz’s error-filled brief makes no more sense than blaming the printing press for mistakes in a typed one. In both cases, fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. For that is what AI is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancy—and one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money. The legal profession is hardly the only field about which one could say that. But few combine as clear a use case with so high a risk. Firms that get it right stand to reap rewards. Laggards risk going the way of typesetters.

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by AI, more than in any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support. Lawyers spend an awful lot of time scrutinising tedious documents—the sort of thing that AI has already demonstrated it can do well. Lawyers use AI for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. These applications have largely relied on “extractive” AI, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents.

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