The AI shake-up of the legal profession: ‘Do you want a computer to defend you?’

There is an anecdote doing the rounds among legal circles in Ireland about the potential perils of incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, like ChatGPT, into lawyers day-to-day work.

In a recent case in the United States, a law firm submitted a legal brief written by the predictive text generator ChatGPT, which cited a number of previous court rulings. The only problem was the citations were from rulings that did not exist, with a New York judge sanctioning the lawyers involved.

Victor Timon, head of legal firm ByrneWallace’s technology group, said the example highlighted the pitfalls of relying on AI without checking the finished product.

Speaking at a talk in the Bar Council on Wednesday, Mr Timon said tools like ChatGPT would play a “huge role” aiding legal professionals going forward.

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“As it improves all the time it will be far less risky, people will feel more comfortable using it,” including at least in some degree to write documents, he said. “It will be capable of generating material as long as there is human input into it,” he said.

The data ChatGPT drew on to provide answers to questions was equal to “a million feet of bookspace” in a library, he said.

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For Michael Doran, a senior executive with legal consultants Johnson Hana, the technology will likely mean big changes for trainee solicitors or law graduates starting their careers.

The tools would be able to take care of a lot of the “high volume, low complexity” work currently done by those on the first rungs of the legal ladder, such as reviewing documents and contracts, or writing early drafts, he said.

“That does tend to be work the trainee solicitors or the first and second years focus a lot of their time. So naturally that’s going to beg the question are trainee solicitors needed or what does that traineeship look like,” he said.

Rather than replace those entry level employees, Mr Doran said AI could free them up for more rounded training at the start of their career.

The tech had cut down on time spent checking a draft contract and could raise potential red flags for a legal team to investigate further. “We use it for elements of discovery and large scale contract review, where we have the ability to process large volumes of documents,” he said.

Big legal or consultancy firms had been “ahead of the curve” in looking at the technology, he said.

“I don’t think anyone is really lagging behind, potentially maybe you know the small mom and pop law shop because there is a cost involved in introducing it,” he said.

The most impressive feature of new AI introduced in the last year was the pace at which it kept improving, he said.

Barry Scannell, a consultant specialising in AI at law firm William Fry, said he felt the technology would “enhance lawyers, not replace them”.

The legal field needed to be aware of the “drawbacks” and the limits on its accuracy at present, particularly if they were using it for legal research, he said.

“I’m one of the biggest cheerleaders for AI that you’ll find in Ireland but I am strongly of the view that it isn’t close to being there yet in terms of accuracy,” he said.

Daragh Troy, a barrister who specialises in data protection, said there would always be limits in what AI would be able to produce. “Do you want a computer to defend you, or do you want to rely on a human with expertise?,” he said.

The new technology would be a “huge” help in cutting down on admin work, as well as making possible suggestions for where to make a start on a case, he said.

If a barrister was defending a personal injury or criminal case, AI could hoover up the various statements involved and “pick out aspects” as prompts for cross examination, such as potential discrepancies in factual evidence, or if a claim was statute barred, he said.

Carlo Salizzo, a partner at Matheson who works in their technology group, said checks could weed out any inaccuracies from AI, in the same way they caught human errors.

“Part of the assurance we provide to our clients is giving them the confidence that there are two, three, four, five pairs of expert eyes on everything before it comes out of the building,” he said.

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“Adding AI to the equation doesn’t change that necessarily, it just means there is a slightly different path to get to the finished product,” he said.

Emma Redmond, associate general counsel at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said the technology worked by “predicting what word comes next in a sentence”.

Ms Redmond, who is also an adjunct professor of law at University College Dublin and trained as a barrister in Ireland, likened its impact to the “revolution that was the printing press”.

“We are very clear…there are safety risks with respect to AI, users have to be wary in terms of the outputs,” she told the recent Bar Council talk on the topic.

Any legal documents written by AI should not be relied upon until they were “factually checked and corrected and reviewed by a legal professional,” she said.