Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle of HyperDraft, return to The Geek in Review podcast to provide an update on the state of generative AI in the legal industry. It has been 6 months since their last appearance, when the AI Hype Cycle was on the rise. We wanted to get them back on the show to see where we are on that hype cycle at the moment.
While hype around tools like ChatGPT has started to level off, Tony and Ashley note there is still a lot of misinformation and unrealistic expectations about what this technology can currently achieve. Over the past few months, HyperDraft has received an influx of requests from law firms and legal departments for education and consulting on how to practically apply AI like large language models. Many organizations feel pressure from management to "do something" with AI, but lack a clear understanding of the concrete problems they aim to solve. This results in a solution in search of a problem situation.
Tony and Ashley provide several key lessons learned regarding limitations of generative AI. It is not a magic bullet or panacea – you still have to put in the work to standardize processes before automating them. The technology excels at research, data extraction and summarization, but struggles to create final, high-quality legal work product. If the issue being addressed is about standardizing processes or topics, then having the ability to create 50 different ways to answer the issue doesn't create standards, it creates chaos.
Current useful applications center on legal research, brainstorming, administrative tasks – not mission-critical legal analysis. The hype around generative AI could dampen innovation in process automation using robotic process automation and expert systems. Casetext's acquisition by Thomson Reuters illustrates the present-day limitations of large language models trained primarily on case law.
Looking to the near future, Tony and Ashley predict the AI hype cycle will continue to fizzle out as focus shifts to education and literacy around all forms of AI. More legal tech products will likely combine specialized AI tools with large language models. And law firms may finally move towards flat rate billing models in order to meet client expectations around efficiency gains from AI.
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Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
LegalWeek 2024 Special Part Three: Bill Piwonka of Exterro
Love & Legal Tech: Cassie Vertovec and Alex Macdonald
LegalWeek 2024 Special Part Two: Mollie Nichols and Mark Noel from Redgrave Data
Legal Week 2024 Special Part One: Joey Seeber of Level Legal
Navigating the Future of Legal Tech with Caroline Hill
Projections for Legal Tech and Innovations in 2024 (TGIR Ep. 232)
Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges: Tackling Racial Bias in Law with LexisNexis Fellows 2023 (TGIR Ep. 231)
Pfeifer and Wellen Give an Inside Look at LexisNexis' AI Sprint (TGIR Ep. 230)
The Future of KM is Bright: DiDomenico, Miro, and Little Review the KM&I for Legal Conference (TGIR Ep. 229)
TGIR Ep. 228 - Cat Moon and Mark Williams Launch the New Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL)
vLex's Damien Riehl on Examining vLex's New Vincent AI
Colin Levy, Dorna Moini, and Ashley Carlisle on Herding Cats and Heralding Change: The Inside Scoop on the "Handbook of Legal Tech"
Jacqueline Schafer on Writing Briefs at the Speed of AI: How ClearBrief is Transforming Legal Drafting
Paulina Grnarova and Yannic Kilcher from DeepJudge.AI: Unlocking Institutional Knowledge: How AI is Transforming Legal Search (TGIR Ep. 224)
Breaking the Stigma: Fostering Wellbeing in the Legal Profession (TGIR Ep. 223)
Thomas Suh and Ken Block on How LegalMation is Revolutionizing Litigation Efficiency
Unleashing the Legal Monster Behind the Door - LexFusion's Christina Wojcik (TGIR Ep. 221)
Paxton.AI's Chau & Ulin: How AI Allows Legal Work to Soar to New Heights (TGIR Ep. 220)
LINKS, Citizen Coders & Auditing Shelfware: Insights from Harbor’s Kris Martin
Observing the Black Box: Transcend's Brandon Wiebe's Insights into Governing Emerging AI Systems
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