Generative AI’s impact on legal knowledge work was certainly one of the most prominent conversations this year at the CLOC 2023 Global Institute, which focused on the Transformation of the legal industry through more robust Legal Operations. Earlier I shared my thoughts on CLOC’s themes of Inspiration and Collaboration. CLOC also hosted sessions on Acceleration - how teams use technology, manage data, and cultivate a culture of experimentation – that will allow AI in all its forms to flourish.
It is important to remember that many of the foundational topics that CLOC has emphasized each year still apply to legal operations in an AI enhanced world: departments must continue to manage their data well in order to operationalize insights and strategy; teams must continue to measure what they aim to manage and track productivity gains to unlock the value in their data and workflows; and managers must regularly evaluate their partners, service providers and vendors to gauge the alignment between their teams and the infrastructure and services that help them run their businesses.
Central to the conversation around accelerating the business is the idea that Generative AI, most widely known from the introduction of ChatGPT, is unlike its predecessors in a number of important ways. First, the underlying technology changes much more quickly than machine learning tools for instance, which may require additional training to become more effective. Thus, features that one might expect to take six months to a year to introduce, could be available and useful within a matter of weeks or months. Thus, it is much more important to follow the conversation closely and practically to distill signal from noise and understand how first-movers apply new features. For example, CaseText introduced Co-Counsel this spring, a platform that uses Generative AI with guardrails to protect customers from suspect data and hallucinations while they use prompts to query contracts. Practically exploring legal specific applications of the technology transforms the way we think about how to embed these tools in existing workflows and helps us imagine what new workstreams might look like. Leveraging one’s peer network and industry community is essential to keeping track of this evolutionary process.
Second, a company’s risk tolerance for introducing new technology and new features will be tested by Generative AI. In Mary O’Carroll’s session on The Next Frontier of Legal Work, she observed that some departments, which have not implemented earlier AI tools, may have the opportunity to “leap frog” the competition, because they have fewer investments in older systems. Whether they make the jump or not will depend on their culture, acumen for change management and competitive positioning. To transform, these teams will need to cultivate a culture of experimentation, which may not be part of their existing DNA. Steve Gong in his session, Pushing the Frontier: How Applied Data Science Transformed Legal Innovation at Google, addressed this question by reinforcing the importance of using best technology practices within a department.
Teams should allocate regular time to experiment with the understanding that some experiments fail, but in failing will provide useful insights into future direction. This is an extraordinarily difficult challenge within legal, which has traditionally be adverse to experimentation and learning from failure. One of the panelists in CLOC’s Super Session: The New Era of Knowledge Management, who historically had been an early adopter, mentioned that the technology is changing so quickly, it may be wise to slow down and try to make the podium instead of being first to market. Blake Rooney, Husch Blackwell's CIO recently commented on the firm's Data Science team's approach to experimentation in an American Lawyer article, Law Firm Data Scientists Are Letting Loose. Each department will need to assess its risk tolerance and resources to experiment, learn and deploy tools as they emerge.
Third, Generative AI technology has implications for Knowledge Management due to the focus on large language models, summaries, and analysis of underlying artifacts. Formerly, unless a department had a robust technology infrastructure and dedicated resources, it was nearly impossible to consistently develop knowledge management resources across an enterprise. Now that computers can generate drafts of topics using the same underlying documents non-practicing lawyers would select, there could be a knowledge management revolution in the making. For instance, while writing this piece I received a new type of inquiry from LinkedIn, which shared a draft of a project management article, written by generative AI, with a select group of authors, who can add commentary to the points within the article in a collaborative setting. Similar systems could be used within legal departments to create a “good enough” draft which could then be revised much more quickly and used for future work product.
With Generative AI making the news daily, the importance of developing a strategy that focuses on technology best practices, clean data management, experimentation and collaboration cannot be underscored enough. Fortunately for the Lega lops community, CLOC is well-positioned to serve as a forum to track and vet the technology as it transforms the legal industry.
