Generative AI

Subscribe to Generative AI via RSS

Today, Thomson Reuters, and the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law has released the 2024 Report on the State of the US Legal Market.

The report opens with the sobering tale of the collapse of Pan American Airways because leaders stuck with an old strategy and failed to pivot as more nimble competitors emerged and an oil embargo changed the economics of international travel. We have seen this executive paralysis and  failure to  recognize the emergence of a market disruptor repeatedl: Kodak, Blockbuster, Swiss watchmakers … the theme documented in Clayton Christensen’s book  “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”  

The report continues the warning by noting how several fundamental shifts in the market threaten to upend traditional law firm business models, most notably the emergence of Generative AI. Law firms continue to inflate the rates balloon and clients wield market power in demanding higher discounts to deflate the increases.

Shifting market factors include:Continue Reading Thomson Reuters 2024 Report on the State of the Legal Market — Cloudy With a Chance of Disruption?

I have lived through legal technology revolutions before. The conversion of legal research from print to online moved though law firms like slow rolling train.  Lexis, the first commercial online  legal research product launched in 1970. Many firms did not fully embrace online research and abandon print until the pandemic drove the profession to remote work, nearly 50 years later. Analytics in legal research provided dramatic new insights into the behavior of judges, courts, attorneys and clients. It took less than ten years following the launch of Lex Machina in 2013 for legal analytics to move from esoteric to essential. The promise  of, if not the practice  with  Generative AI swept like a wildfire through the legal information market. When ChatGPT launched it took only five days to reach a million users and by January 2023 (2 months later) it had a 100 million users. Enter the “hype cycle.”

While OpenAi dominated the commercial market, Casetext, which had early access to GTP 4 dominated legal industry news headlines in 2023. Read the full post at Legal Tech HubContinue Reading Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)

Today Casetext announced that a new feature called Timeline is available in CoCounsel. Timeline makes it easy to assemble “clear, comprehensive, and accurate chronologies” from large volumes of documents by using AI to extract events and arrange them into a chronological series. Timeline enables attorneys to manipulate the results through filtering, editing and focusing. Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters earlier this year.

Time Saving with Timeline

According to the announcement, TImeline :”enhances attorneys’ thoroughness and inaccuracy saving hours of painstaking, manual work and achieving better results.” Timeline eliminate the risks of manual review by reading “every word” in every document in the collection being analyzed. The Timeline report includes citations supporting its findings to enable quick review and validation.

Timeline features

Continue Reading Casetext CoCounsel Launches Timeline Feature

On December 7, 2023 Wolters Kluwer released the following announcement:

Legal & Regulatory division continues to redefine the landscape for legal professionals

Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory (LR) today announced an innovative feature for legal professionals: Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT)-generated summaries of court rulings. GPT summarization harnesses generative AI (GenAI) to simplify legal research…

The American Arbitration Association (AAA) and its international division, the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) have announce the release of the AAAi Lab, “a web center supporting AAA users, arbitrator, in-house counsel and law firms with policy guidance, educational webinars and tools for embracing generative AI in alternative dispute resolution.”

I met with Bridget McCormack, President and CEO and  Chief Legal Officer, Eric Tuchmann, to discuss this exciting new initiative..Continue Reading AAA Launches New AAAi Lab to Prepare for the Transformation of ADR Processes

Yesterday I attended a press event hosted by Thomson Reuters where they announced an demoed a  suite  of four GenAI products and initiatives. Only three months after completing the acquisition of Casetext they are launching a suite of tools which are driven by the integration of Casetext and CoCounsel technologies with TRs legacy AI infrastructure.

Standing on the Doorstep of Change I have spent forty years watching legal research evolve, so my focus in this post will be on the Westlaw Precision AI functionality. During yesterday’s demo, I had to remind myself “we are not in Kansas anymore.” My default is to expect the product to be more like the research experience am used to in Westlaw Edge. This reminds me of the early days of Westlaw – it started out being a system which could only search the West headnotes and the key number system. It delivered efficiencies over print research but didn’t at all suggest the completely transformed and unimaginable changes that would come. No one was thinking about legal analytics in 1980, but now they are an essential part of legal strategy and legal research. I feel that we are in that same place with AI Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, It offers a foundational move toward a new way of performing research and integrating research into workflow. I need to remind myself that there is a future of legal research I can’t yet imagine.

The new products include:

• AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision – Better, faster answers to complex research questions drawn from the industry’s most comprehensive collection of editorially enhanced content.

 • A new GenAI assistant connects all Thomson Reuters generative AI products, building on innovation from Casetext

• Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform – A common development platform to design, build, and deploy GenAI skills with unparalleled speed • New GenAI capabilities for Practical Law – Customers to benefit from AI chat-type interface

• CoCounsel Core – Announcing the commercial offering of CoCounsel skills as part of the Thomson Reuters portfolio

“Thomson Reuters is redefining the way legal work is done by delivering a generative AI-based toolkit to enable attorneys to quickly gather deeper insights and deliver a better work product. AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel Core provide the most comprehensive set of generative AI skills that attorneys can use across their research and workflow,” said David Wong, chief product officer.

AI Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision is now available to Precision customers in the United States. It is described as offering a “best of” approach which combines the technology from both Casetext and the Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platforms. .AI-Assisted Research allows customers to ask complex legal research questions in natural language and  receive synthesized answers, with links to supporting authority from Westlaw content and links to further examine that authority. During a pre-launch event Mike Dahn, Head of Westlaw Product  pointed out that although AI is an important component of the new product, the technology is rooted in and enhanced by “more than 150 years of Thomson Reuters classification, analysis, and editorial expertise contributed by subject matter experts and attorney editors”.

A few observations:Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches Generative AI-Powered Solutions  for Research and Workflow – Previews Generative AI Strategy

The 2023 Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Future Ready Lawyer Survey Report includes insights from 700 legal professionals across the U.S. and nine European countries – namely Germany, the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Hungary. The survey shows noteworthy differences between the countries surveyed.

The report documents the broad awareness of Generative AI’s promise and an expectation of a speedy adoption of Gen AI solutions over the next twelve months. The responders don’t seem to recognize the “headwinds” which are likely to slow both adoption and impact. Top of mind is the ongoing economic uncertainty combined with firms’ need to address the ethical, IP, security and privacy issues associated with using GenAI in legal practice.

Although the key trends below include many issues which have been around for decades, I can’t help but wonder how many of these challenges will be improved or resolved was GenAI matures and becomes pervasive across the business and practice of law.

Key trends expected to have a significant impact on legal in the next three years:

  • Growing complexity of compliance areas
  • Increasing importance of legal technology
  • Ability to recruit and retain talent
  • Increased demand for specialization and a decline in generalist work
  • Law departments moving more work in-house (insourcing)
  • Greater price competition/new and alternative fee structures/cost-containment pressures
  • Growing impact of generative AI/ChatGPT
  • Coping with increased volume and complexity of information
  • Meeting changing client/company leadership expectations
  • Emphasis on improved efficiency/ productivity
  • Growth of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), including expansion of Big Four into legal services

I thought the two most interesting sections of the report dealt with Generative AI and ESG.Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Releases 2023 Future Ready Lawyer Report

Once Again We Must Ask –What business are we in?

Over the years when speaking to library and knowledge management audiences, I have often invoked the importance of knowing what business we are in.

,I became a librarian because “I loved books.” Yet on the day when I started my first law library job, a hulking piece of equipment was rolled through the door of the Pace University Law  Library. This was an omen, like a comet across the night sky, my career path would pivot in unforeseeable directions. The Lexis DeLuxe research terminal was the size of a washing machine, and it connected to Mead Data Central computers in Ohio via a dial-up modem. This “state of the art” equipment provided access to Ohio statutes and cases. Within 10 years the Lexis and Westlaw WALT terminals would shrink, the World Wide Web would be born and the stacks of books would be compressed into bits of data accessible on everyone’s desktop.

I love the “Black & Decker marketing strategy that recognized that their customers “don’t want a drill they want a half-inch hole in a board.” And librarians who thought lawyers and law firm administrators only needed books became flotsam in a surging tide of technology. Librarians and knowledge managers need to be aligned with what lawyers really need and  that they have the unique expertise to deliver: information that gives them a competitive edge, new clients, happy clients, predictive and  actionable insights , efficient workflow, and tools that make their lives easier. (Read the full post at Legal Tech Hub)

Seizing the Technology of the DayContinue Reading AI and the Future of Law Libraries : Opportunity or Armageddon

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional has announced that Lexis+ AI™ is now available to U.S. customer’s Given the legal market skittishness about both the security and reliability of Generative AI, (GAI) the Lexis + AI launch meeting for the legal press focused on how Lexis+ AI will deliver encrypted, secure and reliable results. Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, North America and UK, provided the overview an demo.

Reliable research results. Pfeifer explained that the new AI solution is designed to deliver trusted results because the system relies on Lexis authoritative primary and secondary materials combined with Shepard’s citations which provides direct links to supporting authorities for all GAI based answers.

Lexis announced its commercial preview program back in  May 2023. This provided a living laboratory where Lexis could get feedback from users across all segments of the legal market (global law firms, corporate legal departments, small law firms, and U.S. courts).

The Lexis+ AI press release asserts that Lexis+ AI answers offer the fastest GAI  “answers” solution in the market.” The “conversational dialog” can respond to up to five sequential questions.

Hallucination Free At the time of launch Lexis+ AI is the only legal generative AI solution with citations linked in its responses, “providing trusted legal results backed by verifiable authority.” This  minimizes the risk of invented content, or hallucinations, and checks all citations against Shepard’s to ensure citation validation. The solution also offers users the ability to input specific citations to verify accuracy and flag when a citation might be wrong. Customers can give instant feedback within the product to continually improve product performance, content relevance, and overall product accuracy.Continue Reading Lexis+ AI Launch Promises Secure, “Hallucination Free” Generative AI Solution With Linked Legal Citations