Leading law firm Allens decided to build its own version of ChatGPT because it didn’t trust the original – and didn’t want to share its expertise.
Lisa Kozaris, the firms’ chief of innovation and legal solutions, said the main problem with the public version of the transformative artificial intelligence tool was that it shaped as being more trouble than it was worth.
“We really wanted to be able to provide access to our people so that they could experiment, explore its capabilities and experience first-hand its limitations,” she said,
“But it doesn’t have the sort of enterprise level security that we or our clients would be comfortable with.”
Ms Kozaris said the firm also was uncomfortable with its lawyers putting prompts in ChatGPT or uploading documents.
“We couldn’t have certainty that our prompts wouldn’t be made available to open AI; that our prompts wouldn’t be used to train the overall model.”
Now that “Airlie” is up and running, she says the shackles are off.
‘Get their hands dirty
“We really wanted them to be able to get their hands dirty and engage directly with it.
“Unless you’re actually experimenting with legal documents, your own sort of legal data, your own contracts, on substantive work, it’s actually really hard to test the potential and understand the limitations.”
While most law firms are experimenting with Open AI, Ms Kozaris said Allens was the first local firm to develop its own version.
“Dentons, globally, has done, but to our knowledge, we’re the first in Australia to do it.“
Ms Kozaris said Airlie would help clients do a lot of their own legal work and accelerate the shift away from the billable hour to value-based pricing.
“This will allow us to package and deliver our services in a very different way. And I think over time, clients will want to consume some of our services in a different way,” she said.
Value v hourly rate
“The consumption of that new service won’t necessarily lend itself to hourly base billing in the way that our services are delivered now.
“There will always be some services that perhaps are better done on hourly-based pricing, but I do think that with some of the more commoditised services that value-based pricing is going to become much more prevalent, and actually the norm.”
The name was chosen over George (after founder George Allen) and Judy (after the firm’s first female partner Judy Mutton).
“Airlie was the third option and apart from starting with AI – which was kind of handy – Airlie Smith was the first female lawyer to join any of our founding firms.”
Source: Financial Review
