Legalweek: Is the hype around ChatGPT just a bubble?

Anyone who had the opportunity to attend Legalweek last week in New York City might almost have gotten that impression.

That is not to say that the importance of artificial intelligence for the legal industry has been denied in general. Its relevance to the vast field of discovery, for example, is well seen. The undisputed capabilities of the latest language models when it comes to summarizing documents are also presented as highly forward-looking. Only when it comes to writing legal texts, even as a first draft, have I perceived icy rejection. Why is that?

Usually, after all, it is not the "one" cause that is decisive when forming an opinion. The most common argument I heard was hallucinations. It may be that this topic is even more prominent when a software suddenly invents precedents that don't even exist. The argument that in fact no time is saved if every concept for a brief has to be checked in detail - just like today - also sounds quite factual. The fact that the data status of ChatGPT-4 is September 2021 certainly does not build confidence, even if interfaces for updating were announced recently. And in the end, the sentence "Lawyers hate change", delivered in front of a large auditorium, remained unchallenged there.

So it will be a mix of several motives if no hype about ChatGPT & Co. could be detected with regard to lawyer’s "writing".

Does this mean that the future of the legal industry will not be (radically) changed by Large Language Models after all? I don't think it does, but change takes time on the part of those affected - and unimpeachable quality on the provider side. And it needs participation: without training a model with its own content (data), it will not be possible to ensure the necessary quality, and that costs time and money.

GPT in general and the legal industry in particular: Report from an interesting roundtable.

Yesterday at noon (local time), a roundtable on "Beyond ChatGPT: What Generative AI Actually Means for Law Firms, In-House, Legal Tech and More" was held in the US. Legaltech News Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Wilkins welcomed an illustrious crowd of guests.

Without a doubt, the surprise hit came from Pablo Arredondo, Co-Founder and CIO of Casetext. Not only did he announce the simultaneous live launch of GPT-4, but also of "CoCounsel", an application from Casetext that already relies on OpenAI's brand new language model. He raved about the new GPT version, predicting that it would be simply impossible for law firms not to use the new technology because it was so much better than humans (!) To be fair, he added that he had analyzed his own litigation files with CoCounsel, which alerted him to highly personal errors and gaps in reasoning.

Casey Flaherty, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of LexFusion, initially tried to put things into perspective: GPT is ultimately just one of many available language models that has the hype on its side. However, he also emphasized that the threshold to market maturity had been overcome; if ChatGPT was the trailer, the movies would now follow. His advice: "This is happening now; it will be done by you or to you." 

It was also exciting to hear that Flaherty, unlike the other panelists, very much expects technology to partially replace lawyers.

Darth Vaughn, Litigation Counsel and Legal Innovation and Technology Operations Manager at Ford Motor Company, took a different view: he, too, is excited about new technology, but stressed that at all times domain knowledge must remain available in the organization to control the new tools.

A large indirect impact on advocacy was seen by Jae Um, Founder and Executive Director at Six Parsecs. She, too, sees LargeLanguageModels as indispensable in law firm practice. However, she emphasizes that the use of ultra-fast high technology means the end of traditional billing based on time and material. The law firms are urgently required to try out alternative remuneration models, whereby it will probably come down to trial&error.

In summary, a common ground can be found in the fact that from the point of view of US commercial law firms and providers, the use of state-of-the-art technology is indispensable. Which language models will ultimately prevail cannot yet be judged. I have not heard of any reservations about training models of foreign providers with own law firm content (=client data). And whether this constraint is transferable 1:1 to the continental European market with its completely different legal system could not be addressed in this intra-American format.