Generative AI and the future of the legal profession

Awareness of generative AI in the legal community is high. Nearly nine out of 10 (87%) respondents to the LexisNexis survey were aware of its existence. This rose to 93% for respondents at large law firms, and to 95% for those occupying in-house roles. Check out the introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning on Lexis+ for more info.

This aligns, identically, with findings from LexisNexis' March 2023 survey of the US market, which also found 87% of respondents were aware of generative AI.

These findings will come as no surprise to most – generative AI has made legal news headlines all year, with many casting polarising predictions on the impact this rapidly accelerating technology will or won't have on the legal sector.

What might surprise some is that the vast majority (95%) of respondents to our UK survey believe generative AI will have a noticeable impact on the law, with 38% believing it will be significant and 11% transformative.

Isabel Parker, partner of Deloitte Legal's Transform to Operate service, believes generative AI has the ability to disrupt the entire foundation of the legal market.

"This could lead to some very positive outcomes: the democratisation of legal advice, universal access to justice, market practice replacing two party negotiations, AI-based case resolution, and productivity transformation for lawyers."

Ben Allgrove, partner and chief innovation officer at Baker McKenzie, says generative AI is different than some of the over-hyped tech developments we have seen in the past.

"It will change how we practice law. One immediate area of focus is on how we might use it to improve the productivity of our people, both our lawyers and our business professionals. While there are, of course, quality and risk issues that need to be solved, we see opportunities across our business to do that."

Two-thirds (67%) of survey participants said they feel mixed about the impact of generative AI on the practice of law, admitting that they can see both the positives and the drawbacks. This was particularly true for respondents from large law firms, with 76% holding these mixed views.

Parker, like many in the legal field, is well across the risks that accompany generative AI technology.

"Hallucinations are, of course, a real issue for a profession that prides itself on the accuracy of its outputs. There are ways to mitigate the risk, such as through quality control by including a human in the loop."

Read: Artificial intelligence—UK regulation and the National AI Strategy

When generative AI tools don't have access to the relevant data, they have a tendency to make up the answers, or hallucinate, says Alison Rees-Blanchard, head of TMT legal guidance at LexisNexis.

"This means any generated output must be checked thoroughly. However, where those tools are trained on a closed and trusted data source, the user can have greater confidence in the generated output and hallucinations will be easier to identify, as verification of the output is made easier."

Kay Firth-Butterfield, executive director of the Centre for Trustworthy Technology, a World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, says these systems are only as good as the data in them.

"Generative AI tools can give biased and other non-ethical advice and should be used, especially at this early stage, very carefully indeed."

"All the concerns we have had in the past about whether we can design, develop and use AI responsibly are extended by generative systems where we simply cannot interrogate how they have reached a particular answer."

In May 2023, LexisNexis announced the commercial trial of Lexis+ AI, which searches, summarises, and drafts using LexisNexis content. This tool was built with the RELX responsible AI principles in mind, says LexisNexis chief product officer, Jeff Pfeiffer.

"Everything we do considers the real world impact of the solution, it proactively prevents the creation or reinforcement of bias, we ensure that we can always explain how and why our systems work in the way they do, human oversight is built in and that we respect and champion privacy and data governance."

See guidance notes on data protection for artificial intelligence on Lexis+.

When asked about the ethical concerns regarding generative AI on the practice of the law, nine out of 10 respondents (90%) cited concerns. A quarter (26%) had significant concerns and 3% had fundamental concerns.

This is roughly in line with our US survey findings, with 87% of lawyers admitting concerns about the ethical implications of generative AI.

Companies need to start getting policies in place regarding generative AI tools, says Toby Bond, intellectual property partner at Bird & Bird.

"The risk is that generative AI tools are used for a work purpose without a proper assessment of the potential legal or operational issues which may arise."

Training materials—artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace

One option is to block access to these tools entirely, he says, which risks failing to capitalise on their potential, and falling behind the competitors who do.

To manage both the risk of misuse and underuse of generative AI, Bond recommends formulating an initial policy position and a pathway to expanding use in the future.

While this technology holds huge promise, the legal community doesn't take risk lightly. For the sector to truly embrace generative AI, they would need access to a platform with explainable decision making, operating from a closed and trusted data source, to allow for easier identification of hallucinations, confidence as to the provenance (rights to use) and quality of training data.

Find a legal framework and regulatory guidance around explainability on Lexis+.

LexisNexis has been incorporating AI and large language models into our solutions for years, with GPT and ChatGPT already integrated onto Lexis+.  Sign up to the Lexis+ AI Insider Program to get updates, early feature access and breaking news on the latest AI developments.

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While almost all lawyers in the UK are aware of generative AI and the possibilities that come alongside it, only a little over a third (36%) have ever used it in a personal or professional capacity.

The in-house legal community is noticeably more likely to have used generative AI tools, with almost half (46%) saying they have.

Commenting on the in-house community's strong appetite for generative AI, LexisNexis' director of strategic markets, Mark Smith, says:

"The user friendly and easy to deploy nature of this technology perhaps makes it much more accessible to in-house than the previous generation of extractive AI."

Currently, 11% of respondents are using generative AI at least once a month.

Again, the in-house legal community is particularly eager, with 17% of in-house lawyers admitting to using the technology once a month or more.

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Andy Cooke, General Counsel at TravelPerk, says his team are using generative AI tools to eliminate low value tickets, answering questions like “what’s the registered address of [company]”. They're also using it to provide knowledge on demand to increase accessibility to policy and provide basic legal advice.

Adoption rates are likely to accelerate in the coming months, with 39% saying they are currently exploring opportunities. This rose to 64% when looking at responses from large law firms alone, and to 47% when looking at responses from in-house lawyers.

The most talked about feature of generative AI by far is the technology's ability to save lawyers a huge amount of time. Almost two-thirds of respondents (65%) agreed that generative AI would increase efficiency – this rose to 72% for respondents from large law firms and 73% for in-house lawyers. However, respondents from the public sector and the bar were less convinced.

This is noticeably lower than the survey of US respondents, with 84% stating that they thought generative AI would increase the efficiency of legal staff.

According to Smith, generative AI will become indispensable to lawyers by enabling them to reach new markets and solve problems in a way that isn't possible today.

"With access to the right data and training, the technology will be able to answer legal questions with game-changing speed and accuracy and do so at a lower cost than we have seen before."

When asked how they would like to use generative AI specifically in their work, respondents said researching matters (66%), briefing documents (59%) and document analysis (47%) had the most potential. Lawyers in larger firms see potential for assistance in conducting due diligence (46%) and business development activity (40%).

David Halliwell, partner at Pinsent Masons' alternative legal services business, Vario, says legal research will be a key use case for generative AI, and summarising complex documents and information quickly will become second nature.

However, he also notes firms will need to rely heavily on their legal content providers for data quality.

"Using suggested drafting for a clause that relies on a prior draft where the law has since changed has always been a critical knowledge management issue. Generative AI’s ability to pull data from multiple data sources magnifies this risk, as tracing and validating the source will be difficult."

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If law firms and legal teams are able to navigate these risks and others, generative AI will undoubtedly become a useful training tool for junior lawyers. But Dr Catriona Wolfenden, product & innovation director at Weightmans, says she's keen to explore how it can be used by an expert with domain knowledge who is better able to judge the veracity of a response.

"It has the potential to be game changing for surfacing knowledge at the exact point that it is required by a lawyer – a ‘Clippy’ of its time, supercharged!"

Parker from Deloitte says more sophisticated use cases will be developed, specifically in the area of legal risk management.

"Generative AI’s ability to digest and analyse large volumes of data from multiple sources makes continuous audit of legal risk across the entire enterprise a real possibility – provided the right guardrails are in place."

Rees-Blanchard also flagged that client companies are likely to be particularly concerned about the use of their data (both as training data and as input prompts or instructions to generative AI tools), and transparency around such use, and the measures taken to address their concerns will be key.

The most obvious of flaws is in the case of ChatGPT-4, where the model has been trained on data up to September 2021.

Pfeiffer shared the developments at LexisNexis. “In May 2023, LexisNexis announced the commercial preview launch of Lexis+ AI, a generative AI platform designed to transform legal work. It is currently under heavy trial with our US customers, and we plan to bring it to the UK market in the next few months.” 

Lexis+ AI is built and trained on one of the largest repositories of accurate, up-to-date and exclusive legal content, leveraging an extensive collection of documents and records. With careful training, human oversight and a walled-garden approach, Lexis+ AI will give customers trusted and comprehensive first-draft legal results with an unmatched speed and precision, always backed by links to verifiable, citable authority. 

Find out more about Lexis+ AI here.

To remain competitive and meet client expectations, the general consensus is that there's no getting around embracing generative AI.

Nearly three-quarters (70%) of in-house counsel respondents agreed or strongly agreed that law firms should be using cutting-edge technology, including generative AI tools.

This sentiment was shared by the majority of respondents from law firms of all sizes and the Bar – 55% agreed or strongly agreed. This rose to 73% when looking at respondents from large law firms.

When it comes to implementing generative AI, just under half (49%) of in-house counsel expect their law firms to be using generative AI in the next 12 months. Of that percentage, one in 10 (11%) expect firms to be already using generative AI.

Generative AI tools will increasingly form part of both the in-house and private practice toolkit, says Allgrove.

"Clients want their legal services needs met in an efficient, responsive and value-driven way. They do not want "AI powered solutions"; they want the right legal services to meet their needs."

Natalie Salunke, general counsel at Zilch, says her and her team are working with their tech partners to incorporate ChatGPT into their internal processes and customer-facing products.

"We're in a very risk averse industry. Many lawyers have been concerned that using ChatGPT and the like will result in all their data becoming public, or that they won't have ownership rights to the output."

See practice notes for artificial intelligence and intellectual property on Lexis+.

But Salunke believes lawyers owe it to themselves to move past these fears.

"We're already going to see it more in our daily lives. All this change is really scary, but that's not a good enough reason not to embrace it and learn how to incorporate it into making our lives easier."

The firms that fail to adopt generative AI tools will find themselves priced out of certain types of repeatable work, highlights Halliwell from Pinsent Masons.

"Generative AI is going to raise the standard for how law firms add value. Firms without it will struggle to provide the same level of data-driven insight and depth of analysis that clients will come to expect."

While most in-house counsel are in favour of their law firms using generative AI, four out of five (82%) said they expect to be made aware when their firms are using it.

Three-quarters of respondents from law firms were on the same page as their in-house clients, with 75% saying they believe their clients will expect to be made aware of generative AI tools in action. This was particularly true at law firms, with 84% agreeing or strongly agreeing with the statement.

Salunke says she would only expect to be informed when generative AI was being used if it changed the way personal data and confidential information was being processed.

"You don't buy a car and go "oooohh, I wonder what technology is in there?" You just want to make sure that it works, that you're safe and it's going to get you from A to B."

Nearing half of respondents (42%) from in-house roles believe their relationship with external counsel will change as a direct result of generative AI. Lawyers from large law firms are equally as likely to agree.

In-house legal departments should expect their external counsel to be leveraging technology of all kinds for client benefit, including generative AI, says Parker from Deloitte Legal.

"We believe that corporate legal departments should be challenging their service providers on their use of AI and on the benefits that they will receive as a result."

Cooke holds a similar opinion. "“Everything on demand” is the client expectation today," he says. "AI facilitates that standard; firms who continue to try to meet it only with humans will be too slow."

Cooke also believes clients will use law firms less for generic know-how queries, as these will be served by clients’ own models or by cost-effective subscription services.

However, according to Halliwell, generative AI has the ability to enhance client relationships rather than hinder them.

"Firms need to identify the ways in which they can use generative AI to do new things, such as better reporting and analysis, rather than simply introducing risks by attempting to automate tasks which aren't suitable."

Yet Halliwell did warn other law firms looking to introduce new generative AI-led tools to the market to be very careful about the guardrails on their use, and the quality and sources of underlying data.

"If they can’t authenticate those sources, they’re giving themselves a serious “black box” problem."