As we enter the Age of Accessible Law, a wave of new demand is coming our way — but AI will meet most of the surge. What will be left for lawyers? Just the most valuable and irreplaceable role in law.
How do you see the AI revolution affecting the future of government lawyers like district attorneys, US Attorneys, or attorneys for the many government agencies at the state level like licensing and regulations, staff at city attorney offices, etc. where there are no external clients directly?
Herbert, for public-sector lawyers (and to a related extent, corporate counsel), I think there are two main areas of impact. The first is the ability to use AI to cut down on tedious or time-consuming tasks like answering familiar queries from internal clients -- paste the question (stripped as appropriate of identifying information) into GPT-4 or Claude, revise and upgrade the AI's response as required, and shoot it back to the internal client.
Or use it to draft internal emails, or quickly assemble a meeting agenda, or do other work that uses up time and attention you'd rather direct elsewhere. These aren't giant one-off productivity improvements, but reducing tedium little by little, numerous times a day, can be a real boost to your daily activity and productivity.
The other area is to make more productive your relationships with any outside counsel you retain. That could take the form of, for example, copying that overstuffed nine-page research memo you received from the outside counsel into the AI, and getting the AI to boil it down to a readable one-page summary or series of highlighted bullet points (and then sending a copy of that back to the outside counsel saying, "Next time, send me something more like this.")
Or if there's a query that you think you need outside counsel's help for, plug it into the AI, make whatever upgrades to the response you think are needed to make it halfway useable, and then send both the question and the response to outside counsel saying, "Please revise and improve the attached draft response, to a minimum of one page long," or whatever. That way, you're not paying them to reinvent this wheel from scratch -- you're asking them to revise a starter response.
These are actions you can take with the public frontier models such as GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and so on. (Again, anonymized as appropriate.) If you happen to have access to legal AI programs from WestLaw, Lexis, or vLex, all the better -- you can use them for more substantive legal work -- but I'm guessing your department's budget won't include that. Still, you can get a lot of mileage out of the frontier models -- just make sure you've got the newest versions (GPT-4omni, Claude Sonnet 3.5, Google Gemini 1.5, etc.). Good luck!
How do you see the AI revolution affecting the future of government lawyers like district attorneys, US Attorneys, or attorneys for the many government agencies at the state level like licensing and regulations, staff at city attorney offices, etc. where there are no external clients directly?
Herbert, for public-sector lawyers (and to a related extent, corporate counsel), I think there are two main areas of impact. The first is the ability to use AI to cut down on tedious or time-consuming tasks like answering familiar queries from internal clients -- paste the question (stripped as appropriate of identifying information) into GPT-4 or Claude, revise and upgrade the AI's response as required, and shoot it back to the internal client.
Or use it to draft internal emails, or quickly assemble a meeting agenda, or do other work that uses up time and attention you'd rather direct elsewhere. These aren't giant one-off productivity improvements, but reducing tedium little by little, numerous times a day, can be a real boost to your daily activity and productivity.
The other area is to make more productive your relationships with any outside counsel you retain. That could take the form of, for example, copying that overstuffed nine-page research memo you received from the outside counsel into the AI, and getting the AI to boil it down to a readable one-page summary or series of highlighted bullet points (and then sending a copy of that back to the outside counsel saying, "Next time, send me something more like this.")
Or if there's a query that you think you need outside counsel's help for, plug it into the AI, make whatever upgrades to the response you think are needed to make it halfway useable, and then send both the question and the response to outside counsel saying, "Please revise and improve the attached draft response, to a minimum of one page long," or whatever. That way, you're not paying them to reinvent this wheel from scratch -- you're asking them to revise a starter response.
These are actions you can take with the public frontier models such as GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and so on. (Again, anonymized as appropriate.) If you happen to have access to legal AI programs from WestLaw, Lexis, or vLex, all the better -- you can use them for more substantive legal work -- but I'm guessing your department's budget won't include that. Still, you can get a lot of mileage out of the frontier models -- just make sure you've got the newest versions (GPT-4omni, Claude Sonnet 3.5, Google Gemini 1.5, etc.). Good luck!
Thank you very much, Mark!