P2P

48 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 2 4 You may remember early predictions that AI would make first-year associates obsolete because this new technology could write briefs or review documents. A decade ago, one headline read, "Here come the robot lawyers." Where did they go? Did they get lost? When ChatGPT was introduced a year ago, some asked, "What can we use AI for?" That was, perhaps, a misguided question. Instead, legal professionals should ask questions like, "I need to extract relevant events from 20,000 documents. Can using AI make this task easier and more efficient?" Thinking this way, focusing discussions on challenges and needs rather than attempting to isolate a reason to use this popular new technology leads to more effective analysis and adoption phases of AI-driven tools. At a high level, lawyers tend to follow the same workflow when building products: • Reviewing the content of documents • Highlighting, extracting, and collaborating on the pertinent information within a collection of documents • Connecting related data to the context of tasks • Structuring data in a way that can be actioned within the contextual framework of situations • Drafting, reviewing, and final creation of a product In the past, these tasks tended to be manually performed. Given the number of documents we now face, this type of manual work has become more expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. It should be evident that adding automation to these steps within the legal workflow will add value. AI and Gen AI-powered tools don't need to be flashy and loud. After all, adopting this new technology is not the goal—efficiency is. Legal professionals may benefit from it when it is incorporated into existing solutions to augment current workflows but might not realize that they are using AI-driven technology. We understand the problem with siloed AI and its impact on lawyers… so is the job done? Should we add AI to automate each step in the workflow? Well, not quite. How we solve the problem is just as important. Standalone AI and Gen AI-driven solutions can create summaries without context. Is the summary for deposition preparation a table of authorities? If so, the summary may not be helpful. For example, manually extracting facts to add to a chronology of events is time-consuming. If you automate the process but don't offer guidance to your AI, a case with 20,000 documents will likely create 200,000 events when only 2,000 are pertinent. Instead of solving a problem for the case team, the automation has just generated more work for them. F E A T U R E S "Standalone AI and Gen AI- driven solutions can create summaries without context."

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