What in-House Legal Leaders Really Think About AI, in Their Own Words
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
Multiple surveys count how many lawyers are using AI. A new report set out to ask what happens to their workload when they do.
AI isn't replacing in-house lawyers, but the capacity it frees up is being absorbed by new work, much of it drafted by AI itself.
That is just one of the pictures to emerge from interviews with legal and compliance leaders at companies that included eir, Flipdish, Gilead Sciences, IMRO, Mastercard, Uniphar and Wayflyer for a new report, From AI Adoption to AI Advantage', produced by Dentons Ireland and SiliconRepublic.com.
Rather than creating another survey full of statistics, we set out to ask what responsible and effective use actually looks like inside a legal function today, and the results often belied the received wisdom.
Almost nobody we interviewed reported AI replacing a role or a function outright. Where it is paying off, it is mostly in repetitive work such as invoice review, contract checking and customer screening, rather than in the research, drafting and judgement calls at the heart of the job.
Sergey Kinchin, senior counsel at Uniphar, said his own thinking had changed completely in a year. Last year I would have thought it would probably reduce headcount. Now I'm seeing it more as unlocking unmet demand," he said. I think the complexity of the work that's left after AI will increase. The bottom might shift up, but the overall pyramid of work will increase and grow."
It was a sentiment echoed by many of our interviewees. Maire Neary, who was VP of people and legal at Flipdish when she was interviewed, described treating AI as a junior colleague, something that's additive, that can challenge me, but you have to remember you're the lawyer in charge at the end of the day".
The catch is that the same tools are now in everyone else's hands. Producing a long, polished complaint, subject access request or grievance is close to cost-free today, and the report says AI-assisted drafting now seems to touch the majority of incoming disputes, subject access requests, grievances and customer complaints.
Sorcha Nic Mhurchu, general counsel at eir, said the cost lies less in reading that material than in sorting through it. You end up going back and having to figure out, line by line, what is relevant", she said. So that adds a lot of volume and time to any response, and that's a reality for everybody, not just us."
At IMRO, chief commercial officer Sean Donegan is glad he saw it coming. Two years ago, I sat down with our licensing team and I said, guys, I'm going to make a prediction now," he said. The volume and tenacity of queries and complaints is going to increase exponentially with these AI tools."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.