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By: Melissa Morrison, Director of Segment Management, LexisNexis
Two years ago, the generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) revolution was born with the commercial launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Other leading tech companies quickly joined with the rollout of their own general purpose Gen AI tools and the race was on.
LexisNexis quickly pioneered the use of Gen AI for legal research and analysis with the introduction of Lexis+ AI™ in October 2023. Lexis+ AI was the industry’s first legal Gen AI solution trained on the largest global repository of accurate and exclusive legal content, providing users with trusted results backed by Shepard’s® Citation Validation.
Now, two years after the birth of the Gen AI revolution and one year after the launch of Lexis+ AI, it seems like a good time to check in on whether these tools are bearing the fruit that was projected.
U.S. legal professionals appear to be adopting Gen AI tools at a much faster rate than they started using previous legal technology innovations. A survey by the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) and Everlaw found that more than one-third of law firms are using Gen AI in their practices, according to a report in Law360 Pulse. This is an adoption rate roughly five times faster than what we saw for cloud-based legal software solutions, the most recent tech innovation that took the industry by storm.
Of course, the delivery of legal services is always driven by the buyers of those services — and when it comes to the Gen AI revolution in legal, the clear lesson is that clients are seeing the benefits and expecting their law firms to embrace this new technology.
A LexisNexis 2024 C-Suite Survey found that 77% of clients believe that Gen AI will produce value for their organizations and two-thirds of in-house counsel have already given their law firms the green light to use Gen AI in their legal matters.
“Legal professionals appear ready to embrace Gen AI like no other technology before,” said Chuck Keller of Everlaw. “Those who invest in Gen AI today will be better positioned to lead tomorrow.”
I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion last month at the KM&I for Legal Conference in New York City. It was abundantly clear from the remarks of the panelists that law firms are indeed realizing significant benefits from Gen AI, despite a variety of inevitable challenges along the way over the past two years.
Kevin Bielawski, director of legal operations for Husch Blackwell, shared how his firm is using Gen AI to save time for legal research and reviewing documents, as well as to transcribe audio and locate critical facts. He noted that the firm has clear AI policies always requiring a “human in the loop”, zero data retention and a block on the use of client data to train Gen AI models.
David Rueff, chief client solutions group officer for Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, described how his firm has used Gen AI to respond to a high volume of discovery requests, producing significant cost savings for clients. He said Baker Donelson’s AI policy includes rules that prohibit the use of publicly available tools for client work or anything that contains sensitive confidential information.
Andrew Sprogis, chief innovation officer at Katten Muchin Rosenman, shared how the firm’s clients are getting used to the idea of Gen AI, acknowledging that the technology is still new to everybody in the client-law firm relationship.
“Law firms are reaping the benefits of generative artificial intelligence two years after this technology was publicly unleashed, despite some external challenges,” reported Law360 in a story about our KM&I session.
Henchman, a LexisNexis company, recently published a report in which they asked six leading knowledge management experts to provide their perspectives on what law firms need for KM to be successful and what potential roadblocks may need to be overcome. I will be moderating a webinar next week for which I will be joined by a number of these experts as we delve into the Henchman report.
During the webinar, we will examine:
Click here to register now for this live event or to request access for an on-demand recording of the session after its conclusion.