Posted by Brian Jones, senior director, customer adoption, at Legal Futures Associate iManage
Jones: AI cannot replace native human intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is easily the most notable transformational and powerful technology in recent times. However, despite its perceived magical wizardry, it is a tool that requires human-guided application to help unlock its value to the business.
Legal professionals would do well not to have their view clouded by the AI hype machine: AI can only be transformational if it is aligned with clearly defined transformation goals – and that requires careful thought and action by humans, not by the artificial intelligence.
Manage those expectations
So, how can legal organisations practically leverage AI to solve business problems and drive meaningful transformations?
They should begin by maintaining a clear and balanced perspective on AI. While it can be tempting to view AI as an all-powerful solution, in reality, it is a tool; one that can save legal professionals time and enhance the way they work, provided it is applied to the right use cases.
Achieving this requires thoughtful effort from the people within the organisation to identify practical opportunities for AI. A good starting point is to focus on a specific practice group or legal department, then narrow in on the workflows within that team.
From there, identify individual tasks within those workflows that AI can effectively support or automate.
For example, AI does an excellent job of analysing a document or set of documents, finding patterns within them, and returning key findings. This is particularly valuable for a contract lawyer tasked with analysing the last 20 service agreements a company has signed, reviewing the terms and conditions of each, and identifying which fall outside the organisation’s standard provisions.
Instead of manually sifting through every document, AI can perform the heavy lifting, allowing the lawyer to focus on higher-value analysis and decision-making.
The key to identifying AI use cases is being realistic about what AI can and cannot do – and ensuring legal professionals understand both its strengths and its limitations.
AI for meaningful transformation
This same line of thinking applies when identifying use cases that are truly impactful and transformational.
Take, for example, an in-house lawyer tasked with reviewing master service agreements to ensure they meet specific requirements. The objective is clear: identify areas of legal, financial or operational risk; close liability gaps; and confirm that compliance obligations and company policies are met.
With AI, the lawyer can leverage the collective knowledge of the team to review a far greater number of contracts in a fraction of the time. AI quickly surfaces non-standard terms or potential issues, enabling the legal team to respond to the business with greater speed and confidence.
This illustrates how standard tasks can become powerful use cases that drive meaningful transformation.
Human judgement is still the coin of the realm
As these examples show, when applied to the right use cases, AI can deliver impressive results. However, it is important to remain grounded: AI still has significant limitations, particularly when it comes to tasks that require human judgement.
While AI is fantastic at gathering and summarising data, AI does not necessarily excel at judgement – particularly in highly nuanced areas like legal work – because it can’t ‘read between the lines’ very well.
Fortunately, humans are very comfortable operating in this grey area. And that’s part of the beauty of applying AI in a legal setting: it generates the time savings that allow legal professionals to spend less time on gathering facts, summarising documents, or performing other tasks that AI is well suited for while allowing them to devote more of their time and energy towards tackling complex issues and coming up with creative solutions.
Ultimately, that is the value that AI can deliver – and a reminder AI is and will always remain ‘artificial’ intelligence. It cannot replace native human intelligence.
Don’t believe the hype
The legal organisations that thrive will be the ones that cut through the hype and see AI for what it is: a powerful accelerator.
It can speed the pace of work, clear through the clutter, and streamline workflows, but only human intelligence can ascertain the best use-cases, navigate the grey areas and deliver the most meaningful outcomes.
The best advice is to treat AI as a useful tool that relies on a skilled set of hands. When that approach is embraced, AI transformation can be real – because it’s driven by thoughtful human actions, not the overblown promises of the hype machine.
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