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.
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