Best Use of Generative AI in Law Practice Melds Human and Machine

Generative artificial intelligence has emerged as a change agent and shifted the way professional service organizations, including law firms, think about technology’s value proposition. In previous years, business leaders raced to understand how to best frame their perspective on AI and what to do about adoption. Today, it’s viewed as a transformative way to measure success.

Answers are emerging more clearly as implementation spreads. There’s growing appreciation that while this technology isn’t magical, it will be meaningfully transformative. However, questions remain around appropriate expectations of its use, and how we should evaluate impact, pace of change, and success.

Realigning Expectations

There have been widespread concerns about accuracy when implementing generative AI in the legal industry. Humans tend to be more patient with other humans’ errors than they are with machine-generated errors—a sort of reverse automation bias.

When generative AI can’t answer a question or summarize content with near-perfect precision, it can be tempting to question its capability. But allowing a relatively low error rate to be a barrier to adoption may well be a function of outsized expectations. This doesn’t have to be the case.

Measures of success should align with generative AI’s leading features (speed, breadth of data capture, summarization strength) rather than expecting perfect mimicry of human features (expert judgment overlay, ingenuity, sharpened accuracy). The magic is in properly crafting the measuring stick.

Intelligence Via Hybridity

Lawyers and law firms are particularly susceptible to expecting too much of technology, then setting it aside when it doesn’t appear to measure up—because we’re perfectionists. But perfection is a matter of perspective.

As we move into the future, interactions across human and machine intelligence will become increasingly interwoven. The hybridity of integrating human and machine intelligence can augment, sharpen, and accelerate workflows in ways that are valuable to clients and lawyers.

The goal is to enable lawyers to work side by side with machine intelligence, and to take an integrated approach to addressing client needs.

Human intelligence is our ability to capture information, analyze it, and assess outcomes based on what we’ve captured. But a human’s ability to capture information is limited—there’s only so much our minds can process at any given time.

Technology powered by generative AI doesn’t have this limitation. Machines capture an enormous quantity of data, summarize it, and present it for further—human—analysis and review. By integrating the high-performance capabilities of these machines into our human workflows, we can work smarter and augment our outputs.

Generative AI expands our field of vision, augmenting the breadth and quality of analytical inputs. It doesn’t replace the analytics process entirely. We measure success by examining the impact on the inputs that yield more useful and nuanced output (the whole process), rather than solely looking at output accuracy (because that’s not the whole picture).

Client-Centricity

Applying hybridity in this way enables lawyers to remain client-centric, with a sharpened focus on how we can best, and most effectively, solve client problems.

Lawyers and law firms benefit from a focus on client service and an adaptation of their business model to serve that priority, adjusting the model as needed, rather than attempting to preserve a more traditional and familiar way of working at the expense of progress.

It’s important to acknowledge the power of generative AI alongside the practical realities of thoughtful implementation and change management.

Adoption of new technologies in an organization doesn’t happen in isolation. Important pieces of the puzzle include: the adoption and implementation mindset of law firm leaders; the openness of practitioners; the vision and leadership of innovation teams shaping the course of change; and learning and development teams working to effectively integrate these technologies into lawyer workflows and development.

Ultimately, it’s what law firm leadership does with these factors that empowers a true transformation.

Creating an organizational sandbox for innovation, and establishing a mindset and pathway for transformation, will set the stage for the magic that lawyers and technologists can create together.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Michael Gerstenzang is the managing partner of Cleary Gottlieb.

Ilona Logvinova is director of practice innovation at Cleary Gottlieb, focused on legal transformation.

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