This article is part of “Build IT,” a series about digital-tech trends disrupting industries.
Cohen claimed ignorance, saying he misunderstood the chatbot “to be a supercharged search engine.”
Cohen wasn’t the only lawyer to make this mistake.
A federal judge last yearfined two lawyers $5,000for citing fictitious cases.
These failures could suggest AI has no place in the practice of law.
Benecke said AI tools were especially useful for handling the legal fallout from common issues likecybersecurity incidents.
Benecke stressed that the firm’s goal is quality, not efficiency.
“It’s a lawyer copilot.”
Ziniti, like Benecke, gave the example of regulatory requirements.
The request was made as part of theFTC’s investigation into competition in the AI industry.
Most rely on the same generalized LLMs anyone can access, andOpenAI’s GPTis by far the most popular.
“There’s not a model out there more powerful than GPT-4 right now,” Ziniti said.
CoCounsel, an AI legal-assistant product, says it takes several steps to reduce hallucinations.
That also helps withregulatory compliance, as information provided to CoCounsel isn’t shared more widely.
The AI assistant also provides citation links to alleviate accuracy concerns.
Heller said all law firms and lawyers exist within a “competitive dynamic.”
Law firms fight over a limited pool of clients, and plaintiffs and defendants compete to win cases.
Because of this, it’sunlikely AI will eliminate lawyers' jobs.
Instead, AI could be viewed as an extension of trends rooted in the dawn of the computer age.
“We used to physically review every single document in every case,” Heller said.
Electronic review has replaced manual review wherever practical.
The legal industry has an entire subfield, electronic discovery, dedicated to finding and sorting electronic documents.
Lawyers might also turn to AI to address a force meant to tame AI:regulation.
She added that lawyers have a professional responsibility to avoid inflating billable hours.
That responsibility is codified by many legal organizations, including theAmerican Bar Association.
