A friend of mine who's an attorney, and is also the AI go-to person at his firm (and also an AI critic -- a Doomer, as Hao would say), says that AI is great at proofreading and editing, but not so great at actual writing. He is predicting that the paralegal profession will basically be gone in three years or less. AI can do a document review that takes a human five hours in seven or eight minutes.
On the flip side, when AI writes a legal document it still needs review by a human, because it often misses the human/intuitive side of writing an argument or a brief.
As a result of all this, he thinks that in the not-too-distant future, the law profession will basically be gig-afied. Lawyers will be paid per task instead of per hour, because a lot of the hourly work will be done by AI.
I am suspicious of AI's ability to summarize since I have seen LLMs fabricate things even when I prompt with: Go to this URL and summarize, etc.
I read something the other day that basically said LLMs are going to create a bunch of new work... but, ironically, it will be cleaning up the mess they've made.
For your friend I'd ask, as an attorney, what good is a paralegal who I can never be sure of?
From what he's said, it's apparently extremely good at basic proofreading/copy editing, and also finding discrepancies -- basically stuff that doesn't require any nuance or "intuition."
He used an example of case citation -- if an attorney cites a case in one place with a certain date, number, etc., then cites it again in the brief but it contains a typo, it will find the discrepancy in seconds and identify it. He says that a lot of firms are already moving towards AI document review related to this type of "efficiency."
A friend of mine who's an attorney, and is also the AI go-to person at his firm (and also an AI critic -- a Doomer, as Hao would say), says that AI is great at proofreading and editing, but not so great at actual writing. He is predicting that the paralegal profession will basically be gone in three years or less. AI can do a document review that takes a human five hours in seven or eight minutes.
On the flip side, when AI writes a legal document it still needs review by a human, because it often misses the human/intuitive side of writing an argument or a brief.
As a result of all this, he thinks that in the not-too-distant future, the law profession will basically be gig-afied. Lawyers will be paid per task instead of per hour, because a lot of the hourly work will be done by AI.
I am suspicious of AI's ability to summarize since I have seen LLMs fabricate things even when I prompt with: Go to this URL and summarize, etc.
I read something the other day that basically said LLMs are going to create a bunch of new work... but, ironically, it will be cleaning up the mess they've made.
For your friend I'd ask, as an attorney, what good is a paralegal who I can never be sure of?
From what he's said, it's apparently extremely good at basic proofreading/copy editing, and also finding discrepancies -- basically stuff that doesn't require any nuance or "intuition."
He used an example of case citation -- if an attorney cites a case in one place with a certain date, number, etc., then cites it again in the brief but it contains a typo, it will find the discrepancy in seconds and identify it. He says that a lot of firms are already moving towards AI document review related to this type of "efficiency."