Impact of AI, ChatGPT on the legal field

The economic impact of artificial intelligence will be viewed positively until “we have lawyers in our jobs and incomes,” believes the president of one AI startup.

Tim Boyne’s company SmartSpace.ai aims to
Tools for businesses to harness the power of AI and revolutionize how they use data.

The company is made up of centaurs, or people who use their knowledge and skills to make effective use of AI, and by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, the company can complete two years’ worth of work in a matter of months. He said he could.

Boyne said the impact of tools such as the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT), a form of generative artificial intelligence, will have a huge impact on how people work.

In his view, digital and knowledge-based industries such as web design, law, accounting, architecture, and marketing agencies will not be able to deliver enough value to survive unless they find new models.

He said for the first time we are seeing both GDP and unemployment head in the same direction: upwards.

For example, he believes the economic impact could be very positive for some time “until lawyers are on par with jobs and incomes.”

Even the most coveted professions are in jeopardy, which means people could enforce their own basic laws through AI, he said.

“The legal community is text-based. This is defined as interpreting laws and case law and producing ‘advice’ in the form of legal documents.

“This is one of the easiest things for ChatGPT to do, but by the way, it’s already over the top.”

He didn’t suggest using it for more complex documents, but he had drafted dozens of legal documents, mostly non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), without lawyers.

Sebastian Hartley, senior attorney at Beckett Law Firm in the Netherlands, said AI like ChatGPT could speed up the process of document review, drafting emails and letters, allowing lawyers to focus on making decisions. and agreed that in an ideal world, the cost of legal services could be reduced.

But clients are paying for knowledge, experience and judgment, not ChatGPT, he said.

Hartley said that any business based on telecommunications, mainly the service sector, will be affected by AI.

“We cover everything from hospitality to professional services such as lawyers, but also to human resources, advertisers and marketers.

“AI can provide an overview of information and predict trends and patterns from datasets of billions of items in ways that humans cannot process quickly.”

Law was just that type of service business, he said.

“Attorneys are, after all, in the process of allocating risk for their clients. or share the responsibility.

“This sometimes requires processing vast amounts of information, such as due diligence for corporate acquisitions or document review in litigation.

“Language model AI like ChatGPT can greatly speed up the process by reviewing documents to identify trends, highlight relevant material, and find discrepancies all the time.”

AI could also be responsible for drafting emails and letters to help move deals and litigation forward, and lawyers would be more likely to make judgments and decisions about how to advance their clients’ interests rather than pounding on keyboards. He said it would allow him to focus on refining the draft.

“In a way, it’s back to the future. Attorneys over 40 still use dictaphones and write letters with red pen instead of sending emails when they think and write.” I swear

“It looks like ChatGPT and similar AI are going to turn them back into editors.”

In an ideal world, Hartley said, the cost of legal services, which are billed primarily on a labor-time basis, could be reduced, closing the judicial divide.

“Of course, there may be profit motives, but in my experience most lawyers are genuinely concerned about access to justice.”

In response to Boyne’s comments that Work and Income has lawyers lined up, Hartley said he has been working in the legal field for more than a decade, as AI has slowly begun to seep into document screening, legal research, and assisting with client affairs. said he had heard the same thing.

“The hardest thing is the speed of change. Perhaps young lawyers in large firms are the hardest.

“The joke in law school is that the first three to five years of a career are spent reviewing paperwork. Of course there will still be demand for that job, but if AI speeds it up by orders of magnitude. If they can, it will put pressure on those positions in the years to come.”

Over time, Hartley said, it will also affect senior lawyers who primarily make strategic decisions.

“I do not argue that court judgments made by lawyers cannot be replicated by AI, with enough examples to learn from. Intuition and instinct are just what we call subconscious thinking. can probably explain the process better than we can.

“But teaching an AI to think that way would be particularly difficult, especially since many of its inferences, and the elements involved, are not recorded in a way that the AI ​​can access.”

But in its current state, even that simple thing is a stretch for the system, he said.

“The Legal Society Research Bureau recently warned attorneys not to use ChatGPT to find citations and references for cases seeking sources from librarians. ChatGPT was found to be able to generate citations in the correct format. but it was garbage.”

Further, in Hartley’s opinion, those who predict the demise of the lawyer in the face of technological change sometimes focus too much on the technical aspects of the lawyer’s role.

“I think we have so little trust in AI yet that we always want to delegate tasks that AI can easily perform to machines, such as writing wills and direct communication.”

There is also a constitutional aspect to it, he said.

“Courtroom advocacy is a minority of a lawyer’s job. I really want to spend the day with the problem.

“This is a human business and losing it would be highly illegitimate.”

Hartley said customers are paying for their experience, not for using the AI.

“At the moment, I am considering using ChatGPT to get ideas on how to restructure sentences and paragraphs that are sometimes awkward. Given gender concerns, the appropriate scope for using data for client work is currently limited.

“Also, frankly, these AI systems are not yet sufficiently knowledgeable about New Zealand law and society to give useful answers to research questions.”

A spokeswoman for the New Zealand Law Institute said there had been many innovations in the legal sector and it was good to see that it had made work easier and more efficient for lawyers and consumers.

But the spokesperson said it was important for lawyers and the public to be aware of the risks of AI in its current form.

“The use of ChatGPT and AI by legal professionals in New Zealand is unknown, but lawyers are aware of the limits of their knowledge and legal obligations.”

The Law Society Law Libraries last month pointed out a number of problems arising from using ChatGPT, highlighting ChatGPT’s flaws in particular.

“Our message is simple: Anyone seeking legal advice or representation should direct their lawyers and don’t use ChatGPT instead.”