In an attempt to be progressive and to keep up with the changing times, many law firms are integrating AI to take over mundane tasks and perform research. However, at times, this has produced quite hazardous results.
In this article, I explore this in some detail. I look at potential benefits firms can enjoy and what could go wrong. I also explore what you should consider when integrating AI into your practice.
But first, let’s look at how times have changed for the legal industry:
From Grunting Caveman to the Supreme Court and Now, Artificial Intelligence
It’s as clear as the sky is blue (or perhaps orange if you’re in a polluted area) that times have changed and how we deal with law and order with it. While at some point, the extent of the law may be land claims enforced through a series of grunts by a disheveled caveman, we’re now in a much more civil era.
However, have we been a certain way for too long? Anyone attending law school knows that many modern essentials, be it computing, marketing, and business, are often left from the curriculum. In addition to this, attorneys and court judges tend to rely on very old precedences to ensure consistency and fairness. But does this equal progress?
Artificial intelligence has been forcing the legal world out of its shell and inadvertently making demands that must be attended to. Lawsuits galore are being filed against various AI companies, including ChatGPT, stability AI, and Midjourney, for either information misuse or copyright infringement
Dealing with it? Well, that’s tricky. But the US has been making headway in this regard.
Artificial Intelligence Makes It Undeniably Simple
As you can see, we have a long way to go before the law consistently keeps pace with technology. But regardless of this, businesses, law firms, employees, and curious individuals will be using artificial intelligence.
And this is primarily for one reason: AI is deeply convenient.
AI tools help firms free up time spent on typically very tedious tasks. It can also (with caution) be used for research.
Let’s not forget what happened to Levidow, Levidow & Oberman.
But, of course, programs such as ChatGPT aren’t the only options out there.
AI programs such as CoCounsel won’t offer advice by scouring the web; rather, they’ll provide insights based on inputted verifiable legal documents.
Although it’ll likely still require the trained eye of an attorney to use, this type of legal assistant makes life much easier for lawyers and their clients.
There are also tools that tackle only a specific element of law. Legal tech company Trademarkia developed Trademarkia.ai to help. The registrability predictor is available online and enables you to compare trademarks to your own to assess the chance of successful registration.
Chidhambararajan Ramachidambaram, AI developer at Trademarkia, had this to say about the tool:
“Trademarkia.ai currently has a registrability predictor to determine the success chances of your trademark application. It works by taking basic information from you such as trademark name, description and trademark classes, using our proprietary ai tool to determine a few key metrics used by the USPTO, and using these metric results to calculate the final registrability chance.
Worried about your data safety, don’t be. Chidhambararajan assures you that:
“We value our user’s data, hence we store meta information only when the user flags the model’s prediction, else we don’t store any information pertaining to the tool’s usage. All of your information provided passes through standard HTTPS encryption to make sure that no one else apart from Trademarkia will be able to see your queries.”
Generative AI Can Cause Legal Problems
Who’d have guessed that AI, which learns from data fed to it, may produce content that might infringe on another’s intellectual property? Considering these tools learn from existing ones, it’s no surprise.
While AI companies might argue that their software doesn’t infringe on IP laws because the AI transforms the original works rather than duplicates it, it should be considered fair use; this is on shaky grounds.
Mainly because AI, such as in the case of musicians, may produce music that sounds exactly like the original artists, thus drawing attention away from the musician’s own advertising channels.
US Patent agent Spencer Keller from Trademarkia had this to say about the problems with AI:
“AI provides powerful tools that can and should be embraced by legal professionals, but they have to be used in an ethical and legal manner. As of now, the precise ethical and legal manner in which AI can be used is slightly blurred, but there are some obvious no-no’s that practitioners should acknowledge.
First and more obvious, using an AI to draft a legal document will likely lead to an ethical violation. Just don’t do it. Furthermore, as we have seen from numerous news articles, even using AI for research purposes can be extremely risky and often unethical.
The reason these activities are considered unethical is because AI models tend to lie, or “hallucinate” wherein they just sort of make stuff up. These models have been known to reference nonexistent court cases and create fake citations. Practitioners need to be careful to use AI as more of a jumping off point for their research, or use it as a thesaurus or a tool to correct grammar. Relying too heavily on AI can result in ethical sanctions that no practitioner wants to face.
But drafting tools aren’t the only AI practitioners use. Other tools such as transcription bots, recording bots, email organizers, and docketing bots are commonly used. Much like “hallucinations,” these more clerical AI tools can falter, potentially leading to filing dates slipping through the cracks or missed emails.
Furthermore, the transcription tools can fail to accurately transcribe conversations, which could lead to inaccurate quotes within legal documents. Additionally, state bar associations are beginning to produce guidelines on how to use AI within legal practice. As these guidelines and potential laws begin to roll out, practitioners need to study them and ensure they are adhering to the regulations.”
What Law Firms Should Consider When Selecting AI Tools
So now that you understand AI legal tools a bit better, next I’m going to explore what you should be considering when selecting one to incorporate into your practice:
What Do You Really Need?
Don’t let the hype lead you to implement an unneeded tool into your firm. You may find that if you implement too many tools without careful consideration, some of these AI assistants may be less efficacious than you might’ve assumed. They may even make mistakes.
Cybersecurity
Client data has to be secure. Should confidential information fall into the wrong hands, your client and your firm might suffer tremendously. Ensure that whichever AI tool you choose to implement has very stringent cybersecurity measures in place.
Is It User-Friendly?
Remember when I said that a lot is left out of a law school education? Well, information technology doesn’t rank high in prospective subject integrations in the future. And it’s for this reason that you should ensure that the tool you select has a friendly user interface. Besides, you shouldn’t need intricate technical expertise to use AI software.
AI Is Bringing About Meaningful Change
Bill Gates once said: “The intersection of law, politics, and technology is going to force a lot of good thinking.” AI is going to bring about precisely this. It’s constructing a new narrative about how law firms will conduct their business on a day to day basis, and bringing us ever closer to a more efficient and technologically-integrated reality.
Author Bio
Joshua Julien Brouard
Joshua Julien Brouard serves as the editor at Trademarkia, a prominent legal tech enterprise. In addition to maintaining the company’s high-quality blog content, he focuses on the coverage of intellectual property updates, collaborating with diverse patent and trademark attorneys across the globe.He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a distinguished major in law. Feel free to engage with Joshua through LinkedIn or reach out via email at joshua@trademarkia.com for further connections.
