Lawyers worried about the impact of ChatGPT and other AI developments need not be — it is simply a powerful tool, and its predecessors have been around for years. Viewing it as a threat is limiting for lawyers hoping to add value to their clients.

Take “technology-assisted review”, or TAR, which utilises algorithms to automatically code millions of documents that might be relevant to a particular regulatory investigation. It can be more effective, faster and cheaper than having junior lawyers undertake discovery (which is why it should always be on the table for clients), but only if the machine is properly tuned by lawyers. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

Now take ChatGPT and other AI. It can scan thousands of laws, regulations and cases to form coherent answers. But it can’t take facts, read an executive’s body language, or indeed come up with anything new. It is inherently trapped in yesterday’s world. That one should excite lawyers looking for different ways of doing things, in response to emerging complex challenges. Properly calibrating governance for banks, insurers, and super funds in a financial accountability regime world, which places personal responsibility for failures on individuals, is something AI will never do.

Instead, AI sticks with what it is good at and what saves clients’ time, money and risk. In my practice area, financial services regulatory, one obvious help is in scanning huge masses of legislation, regulations and class instruments to find the answer. I have been baking the AI into my financial services regulatory blog website to assist me in searching my archives, as well as esoteric Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and AUSTRAC guidance. The technology is not perfect, and the answers can never be relied on without triple checking (much less copied and pasted!), but if you know what you are looking for or want to stress test some ideas, it is a time-saver.

More junior lawyers concerned about what the future holds need not be. Theirs’ is a very bright one, as they will get to work on more of the interesting work, assisted by AI and other tools. Building tools to identify regulatory breaches; to scan for patterns indicating bank fraud; to summarise all the requirements to check a PDS; to scan opposing counsel’s submission to identify relevant opposing cases; to notify and update obligations registers as soon as new law comes out — and these examples are only the very beginning.

Viewing AI in terms of how it will give lawyers an edge in servicing clients, whether in private practice or in-house, is the right perspective. Undertaking the work we do now to solve current problems, e.g. providing advice better, faster and more cost-effectively, is an obvious value-add. Solving our client’s problems they haven’t asked us to fix yet is even better. How can we best utilise technology to give clients “stuff that works”, in other words.

For all its challenges, law is a fantastically rewarding career. Those lawyers who strategically, carefully, and sensibly adopt AI and other technological advantages will have an edge in servicing their clients. I strongly suspect they will also have more personal satisfaction in their practices too.

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Liam Hennessy is a partner at Gadens and adjunct professor of Law at Griffith University, specialising in financial services regulation.