Source: Forbes
Author: Mark A. Cohen, CEO & Founder of Legal Mosaic and Executive Chairman at The Digital Legal Exchange. Mark will be one of LegalTechTalk 2024 keynote speakers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the big legal industry story of 2023, and there are a legion of reasons why. Generative AI’s rapidly expanding capability to perform many legal tasks will impact delivery structures, economics, talent, education, training, career diversification, regulation and compliance, commercial transactions, and dispute resolution. Gen AI and predictive AI pose an existential threat to legacy legal stakeholders and paradigms that have become increasingly misaligned with the needs of digital society.
Few in the legal industry imagined the future would arrive so suddenly.
AI will recast what it means to be a lawyer, how lawyers and allied professions deliver their products and services, facilitate-not impede-commercial transactions, and replace protracted litigation as the default dispute resolution mechanism with avoidance. “Litigation avoidance,” will be facilitated by robust, cross-functional, enterprise-wide (perhaps industry-wide) data, enabling early risk detection, remediation, projected outcomes (available to both sides), and early resolution. Predictive data will not replace professional judgment; it will enhance it by providing a quick, holistic, data-backed foundation to support an early case strategy.
AI also has the potential to democratize access to legal services, making them more cost-effective, efficient, less opaque and forbidding, and predictive. It will reduce the need for licensed attorney engagement and/or minimize their “high-touch” involvement for many matters. Most importantly, it can take a big bite out of the scourge of unrepresented individuals and SME’s (commonly referred to as the “access to justice crisis). The profession’s failure to diagnose and treat this severe professional and societal illness has compromised public trust in the rule of law and weakened democracy. AI is not a panacea, but it is a promising component of a broader strategy the legal profession must forge to restore the public’s respect for the rule of law.
Read full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2023/12/14/laws-2023-ai-is-just-part-of-the-story/?sh=56b9e11a1aa3
