AI for in-house counsel seems daunting, especially for those who are less tech-savvy. But many are charging ahead at full speed to take advantage of the time and cost savings that generative AI can bring to a legal department. And these are just the early days, as AI is increasingly being implemented across a wide range of tools and applications used every day by lawyers in legal departments. At the same time, AI itself is evolving and becoming more and more powerful. Unlike prior advancements which took decades or years to evolve, AI’s technology velocity is incredibly fast. What you see today is only getting stronger, and unlike the advent of electricity or computers, the speed is counted in days, weeks and months rather than years, decades or centuries. This speed will continue to increase, and AI for in-house counsel will become increasingly important in service delivery, compliance efforts and risk mitigation. Read on for some real life stories of the use of AI in the in-house environment, but also be on the lookout for updates to your existing tools that are increasingly bringing AI into the fold of daily processes. The legal industry is being changed by AI, and in-house counsel need to be ahead of the curve as with AI, once you fall behind you may never catch up.
“Generative AI has the potential to eliminate the time investment in setting up chatbots, and introduce dynamism in what the chatbot ‘understands’. In other words, our first use case for generative AI (which we are currently trialling) is supercharging our response to simple queries, rather than necessarily addressing complex queries. To take the latter example, an internal customer wanting to understand the intricacies of a single specific business critical contract and how this relates to our corporate strategy will probably want to speak with a lawyer and, indeed, is probably better served by a human. (For now.) But: there’s a huge volume of repeat queries on policy and similar matters that could be more efficiently addressed through AI than via a human. If you have policy documents that are written on a PDF or a webpage, you have content that can be understood by AI and against which analysis and responses can be served. The good news is that you no longer have to build a bot to facilitate access to that content – there are lots of startups in this space (like Josef, LegalOS and Cody) who can help you link together a bot, Open AI and a box of content.”
Source: AI For In-House Counsel – Real Life Stories at Crafty Counsel