Industry Trends

How Is AI Changing the Legal Profession?

How technology is changing the legal field

In recent years, related technological advances have allowed legal teams to automate or expedite work that has traditionally been done by entry-level colleagues. For instance, first-year legal associates at law firms commonly conduct legal research and produce legal briefs for supervising attorneys. Historically, this task has been time-consuming, but now search engines and legal research tools powered by machine learning can sift through massive volumes of documents to find the right information in a fraction of the time it would take a human. Additionally, AI-powered text generators can produce a first draft of a legal brief in just moments based on a short prompt.

Unfortunately, AI can also negatively impact the legal field. For instance, AI’s ability to create deep fake technology (images and videos of fake events) can spread harmful misinformation and disinformation. This is especially a concern for lawyers who work in intellectual property (IP) law.

Additionally, because generative AI (the production of entirely new creative works from simple prompts after AI is trained on vast quantities of preexisting material) relies heavily on massive data sets, there are also risks of private data ending up in the wrong hands. In fact, there have already been class action lawsuits alleging privacy violations associated with generative AI tools.

Establishing AI legal teams

In our most recent State of Practice Survey of law firm and in-house attorneys, half of respondents at law firms say their workplace has established a practice group – or at least an internal team – dedicated to understanding AI. Most of those respondents have a dedicated team focusing on evaluating tools internally for their firm, while around one-third (29%) say their firm has a legal team or practice group focused on AI law for their clients. Among firms with a client-focused AI practice group, data and privacy security was the primary focus.

The top areas of focus for law firm AI practice groups:

  1. Privacy and data security – 69% 
  2. Business and tort litigation – 50% 
  3. Intellectual property (copyright and trademark) – 45% 
  4. Intellectual property (patents) – 35% 
  5. Litigation (other) – 25% 
  6. Mergers and acquisitions – 25% 
  7. ESG – 18% 
  8. Labor and employment – 15% 
  9. Securities and capital markets – 15% 

[For complete survey results, download the full report


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