I recently participated in a private peer-to-peer roundtable discussion with four colleagues - local legal leaders – and we spent some time envisioning various aspects of the future of our industry. The advance of artificial intelligence, with its ripple-effects, was primary among the subjects on the table. Shortly thereafter Affine, the provider of one of our artificial intelligence tools, asked my team of lawyers at Gama Glória to complete questionnaires and provide a testimonial regarding the role of AI in our work. These two occurrences inspire me to offer some reflections on the AI revolution in the field of law, and what we might be looking forward to.
Futureproofing starts with asking the right questions about the business of law, and answering them with a clear-eyed view of our respective strengths and weaknesses. Each industry faces its own form of disruption by technology, so it can be helpful to consider other examples – but to what industry can we compare legal services?
The conversation with my colleagues at the roundtable was frank and open. We focused largely on the implications of the adoption of AI in the legal profession, and discussed fundamental questions that demand answers as our firms look forward to the coming decade. For example, what will happen to the leverage and composition of firms? How will the ratio of partners to junior lawyers change? What skills and traits become relevant, when perfect recall of rules and regulations is provided by AI? Will firms become hubs for training specific LLMs on topics of interest? If so, what might the pricing structure look like, and to whom will the gains in productivity accrue?
Affine is at work at Gama Glória. We have incorporated Gama Glória's knowledge into models for use in the Portuguese legal profession and the results are impressive. The search function is efficient and the end result is akin to having infinite junior associates at work doing legal research. This means more freedom for the entire team to focus on higher-level tasks – and this means that we can achieve more with the same number of attorneys on a project. This has a real impact, it's a great equalizer between firms of different sizes and will become an even greater one as the technology progresses.
So we're working with the machines, we're working with the models, and it's already transforming the field. But we can't get too comfortable, because it raises a really important question: what are the model boundaries? Where's the edge where the model stops working, beyond which the machine doesn't serve us anymore? Beyond that edge, we're on our own. The lawyers who can envision that future, envision that edge, find the model boundaries and understand how to grow beyond them – these are the leaders who are going to make a difference.
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