There has been consistent chatter and discussion about the ‘big’ potential benefits of Gen AI in various industries and fields. Since the release of chatGPT and its regular use by ordinary folks, the world has realized the power of this new AI that can somewhat mimic intelligence like humans. One of the primary reasons for all the great talk about Gen AI is its perceived ability to ‘reason’ while interacting with users. Different professions and businesses are exploring leveraging AI to boost their productivity and growth.
The legal field and many law firms are no exceptions in exploring AI for legal good. One major reason why Gen AI can be a great booster for legal is because it’s currently mostly text-oriented. Gen AI by design is trained on publicly available internet data mostly in text form. And legal industry heavily relies upon and uses text for its day-to-day work from drafting documents, writing rulings, researching
Legal documents like court rulings, judgments, regulations, and contracts are often long and lengthy. It everyday tedious work for layers, and legal professionals to go through those large and complex documents. Gen AI can play an important role in summarizing those documents and with the most relevant insight.
Moreover, for court case processing or outside, legal professionals have to draft different types of challenging and complex documents with intelligent arguments. Gen AI can be a real help here to generate an initial draft so a lot of time is saved and the professional can focus more on refining the draft to meet the client or court case objectives.
As Gen AI is based on Large Learning Models(LLMs), which are trained on very large amounts of data, including legal data, it can also suggest possible legal arguments concerning a particular law or regulation. AI can also analyze opposition arguments and help you prepare better for counterarguments.
AI can be an active and intelligent assistant to lawyers, allowing them to instantly highlight the clauses in a contract or during due diligence, which requires close attention and scrutiny to avoid any unwanted liability or consequences.
Let’s explore where the Legal industry can leverage AI for overall benefits for legal professionals, and clients and ensuring faster delivery of justice.
Legal Search & Research
Lawyers and legal professionals have everyday challenging tasks of identifying relevant information from the long and tedious rulings, contacts, or legal memos. It takes time to manually read and extract the required content. AI-powered software applications can instantly read and return information that is related to a particular case claim or contract. Intelligent Document Processing solutions are such tools that can help identify relevant data from heavy documents. These days IDP has Gen AI capabilities that can read, understand, extract, and return the data that you are seeking. It can work for digital as well as physical documents.
Moreover, AI-enabled legal applications can help in researching while preparing for a specific case, claim, contract, or dispute. The AI with its immense data power can bring up various relevant aspects of a regulation, and judgment to create a coherent argument.
For example in the case of an insurance claim, lawyers can use AI to understand historical records, patterns, and various technical angles to make stronger arguments in the favour of their client. AI can tell how legal authorities decided on similar insurance claims in the past and what factors were considered majorly. Similarly, in the case of some criminal cases, lawyers can quickly identify favorable judgments to support their argument rather going going through a large volume of law books. And since Gen AI doesn’t give you dumb results but rather can hold a human-style conversation, you can also use it to prepare well possible arguments by using its prompt to give appropriate input.
Conducting Due Diligence
Due diligence is a major part of legal work for individual lawyers and legal firms that requires going through tons of documents, verifying, and validating. For example, to buy a property, the buyer has to be sure that that property is legally valid and is rightfully wounded by the owner, the past buy-sell history of the property, whether the property complies with the rules & regulations, whether all documents are original and valid, etc. This entire exercise could be huge with endless reviews, validation, verifications, etc.
AI can come to the rescue by automating this flow with the capabilities of pulling specific information, validating it, or finding any deviation or flaw. This all can be done within a minute thus saving massive time for lawyers.
Drafting & Summerizing
For legal proceedings and at the court lawyers have to draft a variety of documents which could be simple applications, petitions, motions, affidavits, notices, injunctions, appeals, business contracts, etc. Manually it takes a lot of time to create the first draft. AI can generate any specific draft within seconds so lawyers can focus more on refining it to create a final document.
Similarly, Gen AI-powered applications can summarize any legal document with appropriate context and reasoning instantly thus giving the insight that could have taken hours.
Conclusion
Though Gen AI is still in the early stage people are figuring out how they can leverage its potential to work better and efficiently, the legal industry has also started experimenting with various use cases to use AI in legal work. Several legal startups and law firms are already building LLMs to suit legal requirements. It is largely understood that incorporating Gen AI into the legal industry will increase the productivity of legal professionals and law firms, building better client experience and helping to deliver justice faster.
However as AI is yet to mature, users should be careful in risk assessment associated with Gen AI like hallucinations, ethical considerations, and inaccuracies. Like any new transfo4mative technologies like the internet, web, smartphone, cloud, etc, AI too will take some time to mature and eventually open up doors to be used in every walk of life. But nobody can deny that AI going to have a transformative impact on the society in coming years and the legal industry is already excited to figure out the better and easier adoption in real-world legal work.