Who would have thought that a profession not widely associated with tech savvy would be consumed with interest in artificial intelligence technologies in 2023? Yet that was certainly the case, as readership numbers for AI-related articles we published in 2023 significantly outpaced all others.
We suspect that the reason is that artificial intelligence sits at the confluence of three critical concerns among lawyers: technology adoption, law firm productivity, and professional ethics. Artificial intelligence leverages the work of good lawyers today; tomorrow, however, it may transform that entire legal profession in ways that are not yet foreseeable.
Established legal research companies, as well as new market entrants, all offered software products that brought AI into nearly every aspect of law firm operations: legal research, document drafting, contract review, electronic discovery, litigation analysis, deposition practice, and professional services marketing, to name just a few lawyering tasks now aided by artificial intelligence.
Year-end reviews published in prior years suggested that cybersecurity generally and ransomware in particular were leading concerns in 2022, technology adoption in law practice topped the list in 2021, and articles on conducting remote depositions during the COVID-19 pandemic were most popular among readers in 2020.
This year, however, our articles on artificial intelligence drew the most interest among a readership that consists almost entirely of litigators, law firm leaders, and business executives.
There are several reasons why lawyers find artificial intelligence technologies so fascinating. Of course, the late 2022 release of OpenAI’s pioneering generative AI product, ChatGPT, and news earlier this year that ChatGPT had passed both multiple choice and essay portions of a bar examination, caught everyone’s attention. And OpenAI’s decision to publish a programming interface to ChatGPT gave software developers the ability to add generative AI functionality to a wide range of law-related applications. Generative AI tools soon spread like wildfire across the legal community.
Established legal research companies, as well as new market entrants, all offered software products that brought AI into nearly every aspect of law firm operations: legal research, document drafting, contract review, electronic discovery, litigation analysis, deposition practice, and professional services marketing, to name just a few lawyering tasks now aided by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is also interesting to law firm leaders because of its potential to enhance lawyer productivity and drive down litigation costs. We wrote extensively in 2023 about how legal technology and remote depositions were delivering value to cost-conscious clients – and those articles all attracted a wide readership.
Finally, artificial intelligence, to the extent that it replaces intellectual work product traditionally produced by lawyers, raises novel ethical questions. The legal community is at the early stages of considering how lawyers can ethically leverage generative AI – whose outputs look to all the world as if they had been produced by a human being – in their practices. Generative AI is today something of a “black box” technology, where the details of its operations and assumptions are rarely disclosed and for that reason not widely understood.
Is generative AI reliable? Should its use be disclosed to clients and judges? Who should reap the cost savings of using AI in legal services – the client or the law firm? Does AI introduce hidden biases that could skew legal outcomes? These and many other questions are top-of-mind within the legal community, a fact reflected in strong readership numbers for our AI-related articles in 2023.
We suspect that the growing use of technology in law practice will continue to be a topic of keen interest in 2024. We’re looking forward to being a part of that discussion with new technology-enhanced service offerings for our deposition services customers as well.
The List
These articles were among the most popular with our lawyer and business readers in 2023.
Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity
Professional Ethics
Delivering Client Value, Litigation Costs
Procedure
