Sick of hearing about AI in law? Get ready to feel even worse

Get ready to hear even more about AI, and get ready to either embrace it or go the way of the dinosaurs, writes Keith Redenbach.

Keith Redenbach • 10 October 2024 • SME Law

If you have been feeling sick of hearing about AI, then you have been feeling the ultimate illness coming on – the future of AI is here, so you will need to get ready to feel even sicker!

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After 30 years in the law, I can confidently now say that we are at the beginning of a major development in AI over the next five years or so. This development has been brewing in the legal system for at least the last two decades.

From the time that the introduction of emails occurred in the late ’90s and products like eRoom, through to the first commercial AI emerging, law has seen technology adaptations from almost every angle. Now, with AI searching and writing tools, firms can take more work and employ even more people to do that work because of very exciting and useful search tools.

AI tools now involve the following features and benefits:

You can ask a legal question and have the answer based on the legislation and case base and other research of the provider. This is different from ChatGPT, where there is an open source and all the internet (warts, fakes, and all) is used. This means that the safety of the closed-source AI tools is that the limitation to cases, legislations, and approved secondary materials results in a more accurate and likely correct legal answer.
Generating draft clauses is a real thing now. AI tools will look at samples within their database, and if you ask them to draft a specific clause, letter, or advice, then that will be possible to do based on the AI tools. This reduces mundane clause drafting time and provides more grammatically and legally correct answers.
Summaries of cases and other documentation can be performed very quickly. Rather than trawl through pages and pages of documents, the machine will review in a matter of seconds what a human would take many hours to conduct and then write up. This results in a massive time efficiency and the ability to quickly gain knowledge about documents, particularly from other parties.
Uploading and comparing documents is an exciting feature because it allows one side of an argument to be weighed up against the other side of an argument. Prior to hearing or crucial advice hold points, AI technology can provide an analysis of which is the more compelling case or legal stance. This provides the forerunner to electronic decisions being made as the parties have certainty prior to even embarking on their legal journey of discovery.

Overall, and even since the days in the 1920s of Nikola Tesla, it would be seen as an overnight success that has taken around 100 years to unfold. So, get ready to hear even more about AI, and get ready to either embrace it or go the way of the dinosaurs!

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Keith Redenbach is the principal solicitor of Redenbach Legal. Keith started several technology companies in the late ’90s and early 2000s, including recently developing a practice management software for his own firm.

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