Inflection Point: The Legal AI Revolution – Part 1

This past Tuesday, June 20 Inside Practice hosted a full-day virtual conference – Inflection Point: The Legal AI Revolution – where more than 185 attendees tuned-in for an in-depth exploration of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the legal profession.

The conference began with an emphasis of the significance of human-centered #AI and the collaborative potential between AI and legal professionals. As keynote speaker Cat Casey (Chief Growth Officer at Reveal-Brainspace) said:

“Man and Machine beats man or machine every day.”

From there the conference pivoted to a series of lively panel discussions where we examined:

• AI’s impacts on the practice of law - the current viability, adoption, and adaptation of generative AI tools in the legal field, debating whether these tools can enhance accuracy and quality while reducing human error, while exploring the impact on legal research, workforce transformation, and the types of legal work most likely to be automated.
• How AI automation will affect legal business models and client expectations.
• The use of #GAI and #LLMs for data-driven decision-making, potential pricing implications, and the skillsets required to leverage AI technology effectively.
• #LargeLanguageModels (LLMs) and their underlying technology, discussing the creation and training of LLMs, prompting AI tools for specific applications, and the current and future capabilities of LLMs across various legal tasks.
• How quickly this technology is moving (logarithmic scale, exponential growth), and what it means for our immediate and more distant futures?
•  The many #ethical and legal considerations concerning the deployment of emerging and maturing AI tools within the practice of law – with a focus on lawyer use, promises and pitfalls, tech competence, privacy, ideation, access to justice, and much more! 

The conference also showcased several tools and tech making an impact today – with DraftWise showcasing how their chat feature for Document Management Systems (DMS) enables you to harness your own internal data set, query it and quickly come to the table with answers.

And Infodash shared an up-close view of the power of an M365 based legal intranet and how they are helping law firms seamlessly unite all of their professionals – keeping everyone connected, collaborative and productive – while providing flexibility to customize and share ever-changing information needs across the firm. 

All said, it was a fantastic and highly interactive series of discussions that ultimately makes clear that this is not the time to be standing still. We cannot opt out of AI and machine learning. It’s absolutely a time to lean in and learn as much as we can as AI’s impact on the workplace is quickly manifesting itself as a complex confluence of tech, ethics, and law.

As conference chair, Anand Upadhye (Founder, Modern Lawyer Strategies) succinctly said, “the question is now what? How are the movers and shakers in legal technology going to harness this technology to improve and streamline attorney work product? From legal research to brief-writing to contracts, how is this technology reconfiguring how legal work will be completed in the next 5-10 years? Which tools and products will stick first and become indispensable to attorneys, like spreadsheets to accountants? And which areas of law practice will the tech fail to make an impact?”

For anyone interested in viewing the recording of this week’s conference, the full event replay is OnDemand

And finally, please mark your calendars

Our follow up to this week’s event – our 2nd installment in the series – Inflection Point: The Legal AI Revolution – Part 2 – once again happening virtually this September 14, 2023. 

More details and a sneak peak at the emerging agenda can be found here: Inflection Point: The Legal AI Revolution – Part 2

Early this year, it would have been safe to assume that most law firms don't yet have plans to actually use generative AI in their legal practice. As we approach the latter parts of this year, to what extent has this changed? 

 As the dust settles around the AI hype cycle, law firm leaders across various firm functions are going to have to begin making decisions and placing their bets – addressing justification in capital investment, the unification of talent and toolsets, the development of use-policy and governance, among many other strategic considerations.

We hope you’ll decide to join us in September as we continue this fascinating discussion!