Paralegals Race to Stay Relevant as AI Threatens Their Future

Toni Marsh divided her class of aspiring paralegals at George Washington University in two. One group was told to use a traditional template to draft a contract between a building owner and a landscape company. The other used Open AI’s ChatGPT.

The chatbot’s early versions were missing key phrases like “force majeure,” which protects from liability if there’s an unforeseen event. The students had to prompt it repeatedly to make the contracts complete and accurate. And yet, it finished the job about 15 minutes faster than the students in the other group.

Since ChatGPT’s release six months ago, legal professionals have navigated the world of generative artificial intelligence—a tool that produces words and images—to gauge its impact on rote tasks and more. Seventeen of the biggest US law firms now allow their lawyers to use ChatGPT within certain limitations, according to a Bloomberg Law survey.

Nowhere might the anxiety be more acute than among the 353,000 US paralegals and legal assistants, whose work includes legal research, preparing documents, helping lawyers prepare for trial and arranging depositions.

For all the errors and fake information that generative AI throws up, it’s undeniable that it can identify and categorize documents much faster than a paralegal, sometimes within seconds, said Sharon Nelson, who travels around the country teaching attorneys, paralegals and legal assistants. “It’s got a lot smarter, a whole lot smarter, really, really quickly,” she said.

Nelson, the president of Sensei Enterprises, Inc, an information technology firm in Fairfax, Va., has put the question to ChatGPT itself: Why are paralegals so afraid of being replaced by AI?

Its answers: AI’s potential to automate tasks like document review, legal research and drafting contracts; paralegals’ own uncertainty about their skills, and its potential to devalue the human-contact portions of their work.

But the more she asks, the more she senses it doesn’t want to talk about putting paralegals out of work.

“The human expertise, nuanced decision-making, and interpersonal skills that paralegals bring to the table are essential in the legal profession and cannot be fully replicated by AI systems,” it told Nelson.

‘Blinking Cursor Moment’

The job of a paralegal emerged as a distinct profession in the 1970s. It has since evolved from a clerical position to doing more substantive work and helping with legal strategy.

“They’re assessing the law, they’re assessing the regs, they’re assessing the materials and making decisions,” said Marsh, the George Washington University program director of paralegal studies.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last year projected that the paralegal profession would grow much faster than the average for all occupations from 2021-2031.

That was before the emergence of generative AI.

The next set of projections will be published in September. The agency continues to assess the impact of all factors, including generative AI, on the future labor force, said Frankie Velez, an economist with the bureau.

Daren Orzechowski is global co-head of technology at Allen & Overy, which is in merger talks with Shearman & Sterling to create one of the world’s largest law firms. A&O has more than 3,000 employees using a generative AI tool called Harvey.

“You have a situation where you want to start to draft something, and you are having what I would call that ‘blinking cursor moment’ in front of a computer screen,” he said. That’s when an AI tool can step in to write a first draft but you would still need a trained professional to make a final product, he said. He said the AI tool is being used to draft research memos, emails, contract analyses and outlines for presentations.

Kimberly LaFave, who deals with family law in her work as a paralegal at the Myerson Law Group in Reston, Va., has asked ChatGPT for its opinion on something she has already written to see it would produce something more concise or less confusing.

The results haven’t always been ideal: When she asked ChatGPT for a warm, friendly tone in a draft discovery letter, it used the word “kindly” several times, reminding her of scam emails from people claiming to be Nigerian princes.

LaFave’s “people skills” helped her land a job more than a decade ago, she said. Much of her work involves talking to clients, sometimes walking them through the discovery process and meeting with them independently. “I’m very empathetic. And so that drove the bulk of my responsibilities within the law firm,” LaFave said.

Ben Allgrove, a chief innovation officer at Baker McKenzie in London, said the market is not very clear right now on what generative AI models are going to be good for when it comes to “people services.”

“There is no doubt that it is going to make it more efficient, and in some cases, better quality to do lot of tasks in the legal sector and some of those tasks are currently done by paralegals,” Allgrove said. “The question is does that affect paralegals and make them much more efficient so that the market can absorb more work?”

Freeing Up Employees?

Nelson, who speaks frequently at American Bar Association events, is offering a course called “The Rise of AI in the Legal Profession: Lawyers Brace for Impact.” She first offered the course in March, and the technology is advancing so rapidly that she’s had to frequently update it.

“We’ve been doing this for 27 years. We’ve never had a session that has been so hot and so much in demand,” she said.

The hope now is that rather than replacing paralegals, generative AI will take care of things it can do better while freeing up employees where they have a comparative advantage like critical thinking, said Manav Raj, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Raj researches how firms respond to innovations and technological changes.

There was plenty of anxiety in the late 1990s when the legal profession started using computers for research in place of books and software to generate legal documents like non-disclosure agreements, Orzechowski said. Those fears haven’t come to pass, he said.

His advice: “Don’t fear it, understand it, and then figure out how it can be used.”

Anne Newcomer, a paralegal who is the director of marketing for the National Federation of Paralegal Associations, said her association is providing seminars and articles to members on how to use generative AI in their daily tasks.

“It could, maybe, speed up the time it takes for a case to go from beginning to end,” she said.

Newcomer and others, including Marsh, stressed that learning how to use generative AI will be crucial for the profession. Marsh said a recent meme she saw summed up her thoughts.

“ChatGPT won’t take your job,” it said. “People who know how to use ChatGPT will.”