All aboard the AI spaceship
The most incredible thing about GenAI is the speed it’s evolving – its technological momentum. A couple of weeks ago, at the opening of London Tech Week, I saw Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang say to Sir Keir Starmer there is ‘only one way you can survive’ a technology that moves as fast as AI, and that’s by engaging with it. ‘You’ve got to get on that spaceship [so that] you’re travelling at the same speed’. But space flight is expensive, and most people cannot afford a seat on the spaceship. Legal tech, including the latest GenAI tools and platforms, is designed to make legal work more efficient and effective by automating routine processes and amplifying legal expertise. So far, large corporate law has been in the vanguard of AI/GenAI adoption. But this week something happened to supercharge the potential of GenAI for mid-market firms and genuinely democratise GenAI access across the legal sector.
A global bubble – officially!
In June, I attended a few events in London, and I saw the same people at all the legal ones. Legal innovators, who were in the vanguard of GenAI, seem to be focused on talking among themselves in various industry groups. At London Tech Week, however, I was surprised not to see any lawtechs exhibiting, just a few people from law firms who advise tech companies and start-ups looking for business opportunities. That was proactive of them but was a stark demonstration that lawtech is a bubble. And now it is officially a global bubble. Last week, at an event hosted by Mishcon de Reya, regional legal tech groups including ELTA in Europe, ALITA in APAC, and AB2L in Brazil, celebrated the launch of AI2L, a new global alliance for legal innovation bringing together legal tech companies, law firms, investors, public institutions, universities, associations, movements, conferences, and research centres. It was good to see a genuinely international conversation, but there seems to be more talk than real innovation right now.
Caught in court – again
GenAI has been caught in court again. Last month two High Court judges warned lawyers they may face criminal sanctions if they misuse or fail to verify AI-generated material provided to the court. This was in respect of two cases where lawyers relied on citations generated by AI tools – some of which turned out to be ‘hallucinations’. In one case the barrister was referred to the legal regulator. Judges and regulators regularly face the GenAI dilemma – it’s convincing, but you have to check its output, particularly as legal decisions are predicated on detail and accuracy. Interestingly, last month the UK courts rolled out Microsoft Copilot for judges and updated their rules to allow them to use it to produce judgments.
The finger of p(doom)?
What’s legal’s p(doom) number? asked Brian Tang, co-chair of the Asia Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA) and founder of the Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (LITE) Lab, at University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Law, at the AI2L launch. P(doom) which stands for the probability of doom, is a number between one and 100 that represents the probability that AI carries an existential threat – i.e. will it destroy us? For law, this is usually about whether AI will replace lawyers. P(doom) isn’t a mathematical calculation; it’s a way of expressing where you stand on AI’s likelihood to create a doomsday scenario. On Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast, Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of AI’ reckons there is between a 10% and 20% chance that AI will destroy humanity – so his p(doom) score is between 10 and 20. When it comes to AI replacing lawyers, it’s pretty clear it can’t replace them all, although it will probably replace more than is currently anticipated as AI gets more sophisticated and capable. And the number of law firms in England and Wales has declined by 18% since 2012 – which might be my p(doom) estimation of AI in legal.
On the subject of doom, GenAI is providing new creative opportunities for fraudsters! GenAI’s ability to generate realistic images, audio and video is making fraud easier to do and harder to spot. AI enabled fraud includes the fake receipts that were making the rounds of social media, and incredibly convincing fake identity documents. But forgery has been around for a long time.
Deep fake video calls hit the headlines a few years back when a finance worker was convinced to pay out $25 million to a fraudster posing as the company’s chief executive. And GenAI makes voice cloning easy to do and hard to detect – check out elevenlabs.io and you can try it yourself! And, unrelated to AI virtual Barbie dolls, there is GenAI related physical hardware! Criminals are wearing fake extra fingers when committing physical crimes – like stealing from shops – to confound CCTV. When you look at AI generated images and footage, they often get this kind of detail wrong. These products looks like a practical joke but the intention is to create the impression that CCTV evidence is AI generated video.
A real big deal
I was going to conclude that despite the global take-up of Harvey and Legora by bigger corporate firms and the massive number of GenAI point solutions for law, many mid-market law firms realise they can’t pilot everything, so they are developing their own AI tools to align with how they work. But on 30 June legaltech’s biggest ever deal was announced when Clio acquired AI and legal research company vLex for $1 billion in cash and stock. This is a genuine opportunity to democratise GenAI for legal, and about the closest to a one-size-fits-all GenAI platform because most of Clio’s customers are SME firms – which is the majority of the legal market.
For most businesses – and law firms – staying at the cutting edge of AI is mission impossible, because of the speed of progress. The combination of Clio and vLex puts the power of GenAI at the fingertips of the mid-market firms, giving them new service delivery options. Legal market analyst Jordan Furlong wrote on LinkedIn in response to the announcement, “Clio is going to look at legal AI as a practical means to generate legal outcomes for clients, because that’s what they know. It’s a completely different take on the use of GenAI in law, and it opens up previously unexplored possibilities.” According to Clio’s Annual Legal Trends Report, up to 75% of legal professionals’ work could be automated by AI so this combination is one to watch. It is a real big deal for lawtech, something like the equivalent of commercial space travel making room for everyone on the AI spaceship.
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Written by Joanna Goodman, tech journalist
Photo credit (Joanna): Sam Mardon
