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Lawyers should ‘have a basic knowledge’ of AI and emerging tech
While exploring new technology can be daunting, this boutique principal said it should be a top priority for firm owners – and will help make their practice more efficient.
Lauren Croft
Yule Guttenbeil is the principal of Attune Legal. In a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, he spoke about artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, what’s currently in the market, and how he started to incorporate it into his day-to-day operations.
This proficiency and baseline interest in AI and legal tech has meant that Mr Guttenbeil is “prepared to lose time” experimenting with emerging technologies in the hopes of finding a more efficient way of doing things.
“I might spend about three hours one day a week in my working day trying out one of these tools. That’s not planned; it’s just I’ve found something new. Or I’ve just asked myself the question, is there a tool that does this particular job that I want it to do? One of the ways that I’ve done this is I use Microsoft Word, I go to the Microsoft add-ins store, and I have a look for GPT, AI, [or] something like that and see what comes up. Often there will be something legal specific in the name, and I’ll try one of those out and see if that does what I would like it to do,” he said.
“For instance, I found one that does document formatting, which is something that drives me nuts. Is there something that can help me quickly format that instead of spending half an hour of my day applying styles? I found something that looked like it did that, and I was prepared to spend some time figuring out if that’s actually going to help me. And then it’s a one-button press that would do that entire task instead of me spending half an hour or asking someone else to do it.”
Attune Legal has a specific way it wants its documents to look, and Mr Guttenbeil said training AI to do a menial and repetitive task like this one has been beneficial in a number of ways.
“I have found a tool ... I haven’t finished setting it up to [format documents] perfectly, but it does some other things that I wasn’t expecting an AI to do, and can only enhance the way that I work. We’re all fallible, and we all know that, and usually one of the things we like to do is share our work around and say, ‘Hey, can you just check this, make sure it’s all good with the proofreading to make sure I haven’t missed anything?’” he explained.
“Now, AI’s actually very good software in general. It can be good at these kinds [of] rote tasks that bore us and that actually use quite a lot of brain power to go through and check cross-references, make sure that definitions are all consistent, that kind of thing that is very important, but also not very rewarding to do as a lawyer. So those are the kinds of tasks that I think AI is good at. And I have been finding particular workflows that have sped up my document review process significantly.”
Consequently, Mr Guttenbeil said other boutique firm owners should be doing the same – and emphasised that staying on top of new tech is now just as important as keeping up with new laws and regulations.
“If you are aware that AI tools are being adopted by other law firms, that they are now out in the open, and there’s probably going to be legal cases that come out of this, it’s incumbent on us to do our research and just at least have a basic knowledge of what these tools are and how they work. So that’s the first part.
“And then the second part is can they improve the way we actually work? So other law firms, like mine, are out there and we’re using them and we are finding ways to bring in more efficiency into the way we work, and may pick up issues in documents that come from your firm that you may not be aware of because there are higher quality analytic tools available,” he explained.
“But also, why wouldn’t you want to try your hand at using a tool that could save you time? We’re all busy, and a lot of the jobs that we do can be quite boring and it’s not enjoyable. And we really want to spend our time thinking of the higher-level stuff, strategising, legal research or whatever we enjoy doing, extending our skills. Doing the rote, repetitive attention to detail stuff that is just expected as a baseline of quality of service, if you can speed that process up, that’s net benefit to your clients, and it’s a net benefit to you, and hopefully, you can find more time to do business development or whatever other tasks you enjoy doing in your practice.”
Lauren Croft
Lauren is a journalist at Lawyers Weekly and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from Macleay College. Prior to joining Lawyers Weekly, she worked as a trade journalist for media and travel industry publications and Travel Weekly. Originally born in England, Lauren enjoys trying new bars and restaurants, attending music festivals and travelling. She is also a keen snowboarder and pre-pandemic, spent a season living in a French ski resort.
