Insights From Legal Innovators California (Part 1) – Artificial Lawyer

Last week, Artificial Lawyer was chairing the landmark Legal Innovators California conference and plenty of great insights were shared. Here are a few of them – based on memory and scribbled notes. This is Part 1, Part 2 will be tomorrow (as there was a lot said!)

(The challenge with chairing a conference and making notes at the same time is that you only get a chance to jot down a few things on the side of the printed-out agenda. And then you end up leaving half of your agenda papers at the conference 🙂 Any road, here’s what survived.)

Day One – law firm day, there were plenty of great speakers from Danielle Benecke (pictured above) who gave a very detailed and structured keynote about the realities of driving innovation, to David Wang who set out on stage Cooley’s AI principles (see AL article here). During that day several key number-based comments were shared that really stuck in my mind. They were:

One week of work into one minute – i.e. that with AI we can now reduce a week of work, e.g. a large-scale, but routine document review project that would have taken days and days, down to a minute. And that changes so many things about how lawyers work.

OpenAI engineers only plan one month ahead – someone commented that OpenAI’s engineers had told them that models are advancing so fast now that they only make concrete plans that run one month ahead – as to do otherwise is pointless, given how one model supersedes another so rapidly now. And that in turn will shape what legal tech tools can do – as they are founded on the LLMs available.

Turning a first year associate into a third year – i.e. that as genAI absorbs basic legal tasks that juniors handle we will need to accelerate associates up the learning curve, e.g. taking the skill set of a first year, and moving them up to do the work of a third year. (And ironically, we’ll probably have to use AI tools to train them, e.g. simulators.)

And here are several other great ideas that were shared, especially on Day Two – inhouse day:

The rise of digital twins – one speaker noted the opportunity to develop personas via genAI that represented parties in a deal, i.e. so you could better understand what positions they may take. There’s a lot more that can be done here.

That law firms should share their best prompts with their clients – i.e. law firms should make the effort to educate their clients on AI, and that includes sharing prompts that help inhouse teams to work better. Will they actually do that…..? It remains to be seen.  

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Uber data scientist – Michael Kalish – came up with a great one in terms of project planning:

Move fast

Build small

Prove ROI

I.e. when working on a new project for a law firm or inhouse, we should focus on moving rapidly to get to something workable, not try and boil the ocean. The key is to build small, and then with that more manageable goal you can more easily show ROI.

After that you can then expand the project. It makes a lot of sense.

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Big inhouse teams vs small ones

There was a lot of discussion about the realities of working with AI at different size companies. Salesforce, Uber and Google – who all took part – were massively engaged with AI, which will come as no surprise. In some cases they were even building their own AI tools for inhouse needs.

However,

Katya Fisher, who as well as creating Aracor has worked as an inhouse lawyer, noted that some smaller companies are not always in the same position, and some inhouse lawyers don’t even want training on AI as they will say that ‘they have work to do’.

I.e. legal AI capabilities are often seen as a universal cure-all for inhouse teams, but in some smaller companies that may not have a strong connection to the tech sector, for example, assuming they even want to embrace AI may be wrong. That in turn opens up the need to build educational programs that take into account where lawyers are in their AI journey.

And, on that theme of learning, Dorothy Cullen at Salesforce noted that no matter where we are in the legal sector, at the end of the day when it came to adapting to a new world filled with AI – ‘We are all in this together. AI is now part of inhouse life.’

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Right, that’s a nice comment to end on for now. More insights tomorrow in Part 2.

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And if this sounds interesting….then come along to Legal Innovators New York, Nov 19 + 20, where the brightest minds will also be sharing their insights.

And also, Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 + 5 + 6

Both events, as always, are organised by the awesome Cosmonauts team!

Please get in contact with them if you’d like to take part.