Customizing AI To Specific Legal Practice Areas
To develop genuinely equitable AI-driven solutions, the responsible use of AI requires due diligence and commitment to fairness.
Remember when the saying was, “There’s an app for that”? Now, AI is becoming the app for nearly everything, including assisting lawyers. AI will soon enhance its role in law firms and legal departments by offering customized solutions for specific fields such as corporate law, intellectual property, and criminal defense.
By tailoring AI tools and systems to the unique challenges and complexities lawyers face in different practice areas, legal professionals can receive unparalleled support for case management, research, analytics, document review tasks, and more. Here are a few considerations when customizing AI systems to help lawyers work smarter.
Gain Precise Legal Practice-Area Insights
AI systems can encompass multiple algorithms, data sources, workflows, and human interactions, with an integrative nature that extends across the organization. Already, 88% of businesses have integrated AI into their processes, benefiting from its analytical and predictive capabilities.
Lawyers’ roles evolve, too, as they work more closely with AI developers and data scientists to customize AI systems. Helping to train models involves determining the relevant data to include in training sets, such as case law, statutes, contracts, and vast amounts of other data specific to a legal practice area or industry.
The results are data-driven, AI-powered insights that are highly precise and relevant to specific practice areas. AI can identify patterns, trends, and correlations that are difficult for humans to discern in such large data sets. For example, AI can analyze historical case outcomes to inform its predictions on the progressions and outcomes of prospective new cases, helping lawyers strategize more effectively.
With AI, you can also scale the delivery of legal services without overburdening resources. Outsourcing repetitive and time-consuming tasks to AI-driven assistants gives you more time to focus on core competencies and client service.
AI Ethical Considerations Are More Pronounced
Relying solely on AI-generated results is risky, as it can be easy to overlook broader legal implications. Incomplete or biased training data can compromise the quality of your legal advice.
Ethical considerations also become more pronounced with customized AI tools. For instance, if an AI system is trained on past decisions that contain biases, it could perpetuate those biases in its predictions.
Lawyers must collaborate with data specialists and other professionals to ensure biases in training data or AI algorithms do not adversely impact decision-making processes or perpetuate inequalities. Also, ensure AI systems handle sensitive and confidential data appropriately and securely.
AI Adoption Is An Ongoing, Iterative Process
To develop genuinely equitable AI-driven solutions, the responsible use of AI requires due diligence and commitment to fairness. AI integration is an iterative process that requires testing, evaluating, and fine-tuning AI-driven tools based on real-world scenarios and feedback. This involves regularly assessing the relevance of AI’s insights and collecting feedback from clients who benefit from these tools. Lawyers must also provide ongoing feedback to refine and align AI tools with their needs while serving as ethical guardians of AI systems.
With AI customization, law firms and legal departments can optimize resource allocation, serve more clients more efficiently, and remain competitive in an increasingly challenging market. Get ready to tap into the opportunity to thrive with AI customization in your practice!
Olga V. Mack is a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and a Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on three books: Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA 2024), The Rise of Product Lawyers: An Analytical Framework to Systematically Advise Your Clients Throughout the Product Lifecycle (Globe Law and Business 2024), and Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data (Globe Law and Business 2024). You can follow Olga on LinkedIn and Twitter @olgavmack.
