Could AI and ChatGPT help the legal profession? Photo / Alex Cairns
The economic impact of artificial intelligence could be viewed positively until “we’ve got lawyers lining up at Work and Income”, the boss of an AI start-up company believes.
Tim Boyne’s company SmartSpace.ai aims to provide tools for businesses to harness the power of AI and revolutionise the way they use data.
The company is made up of centaurs - people who use their knowledge and skills to use AI effectively and he says by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence the company has been able to complete two years’ worth of work in a few months.
Boyne said the impact of tools such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a form of generative artificial intelligence, would have a massive impact on how people work.
In his view, digital and knowledge-based industries such as web design, law, accounting, architecture and marketing agencies would cease to provide enough value to stay viable if they did not find new models.
He said for the first time we could see GDP and unemployment both heading in the same direction - up.
For example, he believes the economic impacts could be seen as very positive for a while “until we’ve got lawyers lining up at Work and Income”.
Even the most coveted professions were at risk which could mean people could be doing their own basic law through AI, he said.
“The legal profession is text-based. It is defined as interpreting law and precedents and then generating ‘advice’ in the form of legal documents.
“That’s one of the easiest things for ChatGPT to do, which by the way, has already passed the bar.”
While he was not suggesting it be used for more complex documents, he had created dozens of legal documents mainly NDAs, or non-disclosure agreements, without involving a lawyer.
Holland Beckett Law senior solicitor Sebastian Hartley agreed AI, like ChatGPT, could speed up the process of reviewing documents, drafting emails and letters, leaving lawyers to focus on judgement calls and in an ideal world reduce the cost of legal services.
However, he said clients paid them for their knowledge, experience and judgment, not ChatGPT.
Hartley said every business based on information and communication would be impacted by AI, mostly the services sector.
“Everything from hospitality to professional services like lawyers, but also HR, advertisers and marketers.
“AI could provide summaries of information or predict trends or patterns from a dataset with billions of items in a way humans could not quickly process.”
Law was exactly that type of service business, he said.
“Ultimately as lawyers are in the process of allocating risk for clients: either looking forward and trying to help them achieve their goals by striking a deal for them, or arguing the toss and allocating blame after the fact.
“To do that we need to process vast amounts of information at times: be that due diligence for a business purchase or document review in litigation.
“Language-model AI like ChatGPT can greatly speed up the process by reviewing documents to identify trends, highlighting relevant material and increasingly finding inconsistencies.”
AI could also take care of drafting the emails and letters that help drive forward deals and cases, letting lawyers focus on making the judgment calls on how to advance client interests and refining a draft rather than hammering at the keyboard, he said.
“It’s back to the future in a way - lawyers over 40 still swear by their dictaphones and then red penning a letter rather than sending an email, saying they think and write better.
“ChatGPT and similar AI looks set to turn them back into editors.”
Hartley said in an ideal world this would reduce the cost of legal services, which were primarily billed on an hours-worked basis, potentially closing the justice gap.
“Of course, there’ll also be a profit motive at play, but my experience is most lawyers do genuinely hold concerns for access to justice.”
In response to Boyne’s comment about lawyers lining up at Work and Income, Hartley said that they had heard similar things in the law for more than a decade as AI began to creep into assisting document review, legal research and client management.
“It’s the rate of change that’ll be hardest. It’ll probably be hardest on younger lawyers in the larger firms.
“The joke at law school is the first 3-5 years of a career there is spent on document review. There’ll still be a call for that work of course, but if AI can speed that up by orders of magnitude there’ll be pressure on those positions in coming years.”
In time, Hartley said that would also impact lawyers at higher rungs who mainly make the strategic decisions.
“I don’t pretend that the judgment calls lawyers make couldn’t be replicated by an AI given enough examples to learn from: intuition and instinct is just what we call subconscious thought. AI can probably explain its processes better than we could.
“But it’ll be harder to teach AI to think that way, not least because a lot of that reasoning and the factors that go into it isn’t recorded in a way AI can access.”
But even the straightforward stuff was a stretch for the systems as things stand, he said.
“The law society research service recently warned lawyers off using ChatGPT to find the citations - references - for cases they wanted the librarians to source. It turns out ChatGPT could produce a citation in the right format but that was garbage.”
Beyond that, Hartley said, in his opinion, those predicting the demise of lawyers in the face of technological change sometimes focus too much on the technical aspects of the lawyer’s role.
“I don’t think there’s nearly enough trust in AI yet for people to want to always delegate tasks that AI could do easily - making wills, straightforward conveyancing - to a machine.”
There was also a constitutional dimension to that, he said.
“Courtroom advocacy is a minority of what lawyers do. I’m a courtroom advocate and people really do want a day in court, looking the judge, jury and other side in the eye - especially in family and criminal matters.
“That’s a human enterprise and it would be hugely delegitimising to lose that.”
Hartley said their clients retained and paid them for their experience and did not pay them to use AI
“At the moment we’ll look to use ChatGPT for ideas on how to reframe an awkward sentence or paragraph on occasion. But especially given privacy and confidentiality concerns inputting client data into third-party systems, the proper scope for using it for client work is limited at the moment.
“Also, frankly, these AI systems don’t know enough about New Zealand law and society to give useful answers to research questions - yet.”
A New Zealand Law Society spokesperson said there was a lot of technological innovation in the legal sector that made it easier and more efficient for lawyers and consumers, which was a good thing.
However, the spokesperson said it was important that lawyers and the public were aware of the risks of AI in its current form.
“The use of ChatGPT and AI in New Zealand by the legal profession is not known, but lawyers are aware of the limitations of its knowledge and the obligations on them under the law.”
The Law Society Law Libraries last month noted a number of issues that arose from using ChatGPT - which highlights the deficiencies with ChatGPT in particular.
“Our message is simple - people seeking legal advice and representation should instruct a lawyer and not use ChatGPT as a substitute.”
A disregard for authority could be why those attending court are thumbing their noses.