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.