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.

Allowed to be wrong sometimes

For years now, the question has been discussed again and again in relevant formats whether lawyers will need programming skills in the future. I have always denied this - to acquire and maintain good legal knowledge is enough to fill an evening, there is no room for another discipline (apart from exceptions).

Today I say: that was too short-sighted. Just as marketing professionals need to have a deep understanding of the processes around digital advertising, lawyers of the future need to have a good understanding of the relevant digital technologies.

They don't have to be the ones writing lines of code for e-discovery suites. But they do need to be able to assess what to expect from the various technologies that are usually grouped under the umbrella term "artificial intelligence." Lawyers and notaries, corporate lawyers, judges, prosecutors and administrative lawyers - all of them will, in the course of their very own work, be facing the question of the use of technology for certain process or procedural steps and will have to assess for themselves what they can expect from it and what the risks are. By this I don't mean the eternal data protection issues, but issues such as bias, training sets, confidentiality, and most especially error calculus.

This also creates a whole new set of challenges for legal academia, but even more so for continuing legal education. For a long time, lawyers have seen time constraints as their central problem. The tension will only be resolved if ... but that is another story.

Lent

A week ago, Catholics began this year's Lent. It lasts 40 days, but only because they do not count Sundays; in reality, it is 6 ½ weeks. Today, Lent is mainly equated with abstaining from alcohol, nicotine and fatty foods. In truth, however, it is a time for reflection and inner contemplation. Even if the current geopolitical situation with Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is not suitable for finding inner peace, I would like to briefly apply the idea of renewal to the legal profession and its tools.

One mantra of legal digitization is as follows: Law firms should standardize their processes for reasons of cost reduction and quality assurance and make use of commercial tools ("LegalTech").As a result, the same texts would then be used by many law firms for frequently occurring processes, and at a lower cost accordingly.

After a bit of introspection, however, one could also say: from a third party's point of view, this may be desirable and sensible, but is it enforceable? Obviously, there are major hurdles, otherwise the numerous systems on the market would already have become more widespread. This need not come as a surprise, because which company will agree to changes that make its own market performance interchangeable without massive pressure? Certainly, it is then argued that it is not about "bespoke lawyering", but about the surrounding - but what if the surrounding earns the greater part of the rent in one or the other law firm?

One need not be surprised that the various text generators and clause managers are primarily found in the legal departments: there are similar cases there in high frequency, and the legal departments are not in competition with each other.