Earlier I received a message that asked me if I think AI will replace lawyers, a great question.

A while back I did a short post on AI, Law and Chinese wall. This is because I think this is one of those things that needs to be understood when considering rolling out AI at a law firm.

Yesterday after doing my final post of the week, I had an hour over on "Hugging Face". For those who don't know, "Hugging Face" is the go-to place for open AI models. They have a fair amount of models that have been pre-trained for various subjects. You can download these models straight onto your machine using "LM Studio", see yesterday's post for more details. Then you can have a go at creating embeddings etc, more on this another day.

Hugging Face is really great because you can find models that have been pre-trained on lots of different subjects including law, medicine, finance, physics, biology, maths, history, and even electrical engineering. A pre-trained Law model on Hugging Face refers to a language model that has been trained on legal texts, including statutes, case law, and other relevant legal materials. If I am honest I don't have any real idea what "other relevant legal materials", so I asked an LLM, and this was the answer I got,

"...constitutions, regulations, court decisions, academic literature, and relevant news articles..."

There are a lot of people working on the leading and perhaps, bleeding edge, of AI. It is fair to say that they are discovering and reporting on something amazing each day. This is because we have some major corporations spending some major bucks in the field of AI. To give you some idea, Meta has invested in 600,000 GPTs, which would have cost 10s of billions. Major bucks.

If you are in the AI world then all you talk about is AI and it is very easy to think that the entire world is also talking about AI and that massive disruptive change is already upon us. The truth though, when you get out into the real world, is that while many may have heard of the coming of AI, few are currently using it in industry at the moment. The IT guys are using it and there are other early adopters, but it is going to take a few years for many businesses.

That said, the law seems to be one of those areas that is ripe for early adoption. Will this soon lead to many of them being "displaced"?

Ultimately, I think the answer is no. I don't think AI will put lawyers out of business.

Law involves people, emotions, relationships, and context which is currently beyond existing AI. But AI is going to change the job of lawyers for sure and if I was a law firm I would be getting my people proficient in AI and how it is going to fit into the legal landscape.

Those who get the jump on this can have bespoke LLMs trained on their own material that can do a whole load of heavy lifting within the firm. At the very least this would make the legal process a lot more efficient.

For those running law firms, give your IT people the space to start investigating how they can best implement an AI solution. I doubt you will regret it.

Bryan
ps. This is written by a human, me, except for the bit in italics which was generated by the "Llama 2 law sage V0.2 7B" LLM. This is definitely my last post of the week.