It has only just begun, but change is already in the air. Both corporate legal departments and law firms, as well as the industry's own AI tool providers, have jumped into the race. According to a report by specialist consultancy LexisNexis, 26% of lawyers already use AI tools on a regular basis. In six months this percentage has doubled.
Manuel Fernández Condearena, partner of Legal Management Consulting at Deloitte Legal, highlights that there is a feeling among companies and law firms that they have to join the AI wave in order not to be left behind. In this scenario, the lawyer's natural resistance to change is less than at other times of transformation.
"This is a technology that was not born for the legal world. It is a general-purpose technology. What happens is that as one of its great capabilities is to work with text and lawyers live in text, the impact on the legal world is brutal," explains Fernandez. "And that's even talking about general language models, which are not specifically prepared for the legal world."
The Deloitte Legal partner works mostly doing client-facing consulting on the transformation of legal advice. This gives him a panoramic view of the market, which has gone through other phases of enthusiasm with different technologies. In recent years, the metaverse or blockchain have been in the spotlight. But in no case have the expectations raised been matched by actual utility.
Could the same thing happen with AI? "I think the perception here is that this does change our lives," Fernandez stresses. "Because if you get into a normal language model that is open to the public, even free of charge, and the first result of what you ask for is reasonably usable, when we work on it, refine it and train it, the impact will be enormous.
Change at breakneck speed
There is a difference with other waves of technological innovation. At knowledge management solutions company Lefebvre, they have experienced change from the inside. They have developed their own model, oriented to the legal sector - resonantly named GenIA-L - and have worked with specific alliances to nurture other companies' systems. They recently reached an agreement with PwC Legal Spain to feed their version of Harvey. "There is a very important difference, the speed," notes María de la O Martínez, Director of Innovation at Lefebvre Group when comparing with other stages.
"This is going at breakneck speed. There are changes every day, there are new functionalities, there are new players around generative AI. It's impressive and it means that we all have to be very trained, very up to date," says de la O Martinez. In his opinion, this wave of AI is also perceived as different from previous ones in LegalTech because of how useful the technology can be on a day-to-day basis. "It's a technology that has come to make our lives easier. And it has come to stay. There are a lot of jobs that are surely going to be reconfigured, because things will be done differently. It will allow us to do much more valuable things," he says.
For his part, Fernandez says that many large companies are beginning to explore generative AI projects. Here he highlights the role played by the legal departments of these companies, whether internal or external. They are teams capable of helping with everything related to regulation and compliance, to which is added an ethical part that will become increasingly important.
"In the end, generative digital intelligence is a technological change that also requires relatively large investments. And there is always more investment capacity in business than in legal counsel. So law firms, in general, what they are doing is seeing where generative AI has a greater or lesser return," explains Fernandez.
It's a phase, therefore, of exploration. Instead of having large use cases already in place, companies are choosing use cases that are more narrowly defined and then scalable. This makes it easier for them to implement these projects and then validate them. Only when everything is satisfactory will it be time to expand that particular application.
The AI assistant model
At Lefebvre, important decisions were made to address the new wave of artificial intelligence. The group worked on the governance of this technology and created committees, one for AI at the global level, another of a strategic nature, as well as one for internal processes. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel. We are many experts in many areas and what we want with these committees is to share information and that the teams can work together to be able to launch solutions quickly and in a coordinated manner," says de la O Martínez.
Lefebvre's Chief Innovation Officer says that you don't start a company meeting without talking about AI. It's just an anecdote, but it reflects the impact that technology is having today in companies whose core business was not traditionally related to AI.
Within the day-to-day work of the jurist, AI tools are posed as an accompaniment. "You have an assistant that accompanies the lawyer in his or her day-to-day work, facilitating certain tasks, such as generating first drafts, analyzing large amounts of information or visualizing data, among others," says Fernández. "The approach being followed is to try to see how it impacts the way we work and how the lawyer can rely more on generative AI to be more productive, more efficient, to work better. In short, to live better."
This approach is based on starting small to grow from a solid base. The ultimate goal, of course, is to replicate the experience in other parts of the workforce. Legal professionals not only use these types of applications for purely legal tasks, they also allow them to streamline their management work.
"We have seen that there are enormous opportunities, that our client's day-to-day work is much easier. These tools greatly streamline the lawyer's daily work," says de la O Martínez. His company, he insists, has made an effort to launch solutions on the market that go in that direction, as a support for the lawyer. There seems to be no turning back.
