AI & LAW

It’s Not What You Know, It's How You Know It

Last week I spoke at the #LegalAI conference, encouraging lawyers to 'Turn and Face the Strange'. I gave a whistle stop tour back through what AI is currently and into the realms of tangible AI using film analogies to indicate that technology uptake is ahead in some areas of law and behind in others and I urged lawyers to talk to AI providers about what is available, not just look at ways of automating existing workflows.

My first phone was a Nokia and my first work laptop was one lent out under strict protocols by the IT department (in the basement). The IT dept said 'don't catch the tube with it'. They should have added 'don' t try and run for a bus either,' as it weighed in at 8kg and the leather bag it came in weighed about the same and might as well have had 'Mug Me' emblazoned on the side. I'm pleased to say that I am in the minority of lawyers (about 36% of us are Generation X'ers and Millenials and by far the biggest cohort in law are the Generation Z’s who have the joy and responsibility of changing how legal services are provided in future. Generation Z's represent 46% of the profession and they don’t remember a world without touch screens & iPhones. They have an expectation of working mobile, on demand to meet the needs of their clients, not to keep up appearances for their boss. They don’t see a 3 hour commute as a rite of passage or consider it a worthwhile use of time to battle traffic to a meeting they can do on Facetime, Skype or via Slack. Post-Millennials (and the ‘Generation Alpha’ that will come after them entering the workplace earlier to avoid being saddled with University debt) are digital natives who don’t expect a job for life and are already equipped with the knowledge that there are better ways of learning and working than ever before.

Why is this important? It is important because the way lawyers work will change dramatically in the medium term, driven by the demands of clients and the desire of new entrants to the profession to work differently from past practices. 

I don’t see disruptors to legal practice coming from within the legal sector, but from outside it. Who needs legal counsel to interpret a clause when contracts can self-regulate? Why engage a legal team to fight a case when your insurers have used AI to sift through every like contract and predict the likely outcome based on caselaw? Who needs a conveyancer when all land titles are on the blockchain and so are purchaser, vendor & loan company details? Does a business really need in-house counsel when it can buy in those skills just in time in the territory it needs them in? All of this indicates that as lawyers, it’s not just what you know, but how you use that knowledge to engage with your clients that is important.

One thing that came out of the #LegalAI conference was that clients increasingly expect contract builders with standardised ‘risk free’ clauses to be available from their legal service providers and this is less about 'free' than about overall value of the offering from your attorney. Many of these systems are driven by AI, but will that replace lawyers entirely? Not in the short term and long term not for everything.

As for Artificial Intelligence, it has a massive IQ but zero EQ. A human brain is not just a computer, it does more than process input according to a set of instructions. It thinks, it improves, it creates and cares. So long as we use our business tools intelligently and engage with our clients thoughtfully, a lawyers’ skills and empathy will always be needed.