Salizzo: Law firms evolving in AI age
A boom in legal correspondence generated by AI is “not about to level off any time soon”, in-house lawyers have predicted.
On the positive side, any replacement of roles or functions as a result of AI was “very much the exception, not the rule”.
Global law firm Dentons said most of the in-house lawyers it spoke to “described AI unlocking capacity rather than removing work, and almost none treated that as an unambiguous win.
“More capacity means more volume, in complaints, in contracts, in correspondence that a legal team is now obliged to answer at a scale that did not exist three years ago.”
Since producing “polished, professional-looking text is now nearly cost-free”, the correspondence in-house legal teams received was growing accordingly.
“The volume issue was cited by virtually every interviewee. The tools that make it fast to produce a complaint, a subject access request or a hastily reconciled legal opinion are just as effective at producing volume itself, and nobody in this research thought that volume was about to level off any time soon.”
This was “not good for either businesses or the people they engage with”.
Dentons based the report From AI Adoption to AI Advantage [1], on interviews with senior in-house lawyers at Irish and international companies.
The research was carried out by Dentons’ Dublin-based technology, media and telecommunications partners Carlo Salizzo and David Kirton.
Kirton: AI-generated noise does not actually advance a case
Mr Kirton commented: “The risk is that genuine voices and genuine issues get drowned out in the noise of AI-generated arguments that are exaggerated, or just not based on fact or not appropriate for the situation.
“While the ability to generate a long, detailed, legal-sounding letter may be very encouraging to an employee, data subject or consumer with a grievance, more often than not it won’t actually help them advance their case.”
Mr Salizzo said AI-generated correspondence had led Dentons to offer clients a managed service for high-volume complaints.
“We can provide clients with the appropriately managed and priced team to deal with that step up in volume and complexity. And that’s just part of the evolution of the law firm in the AI age as we see it – being able to provide those additional services.”
The lawyers said that “perhaps the single clearest finding across every interview we conducted was that any replacement of roles or functions was very much the exception, not the rule.
“Most described AI settling in as an ‘assistant’ layer, support for a person rather than a substitute for one, with only a handful of narrow, siloed tasks handed over wholesale.”
On pricing and AI, the report said “consumption-based pricing looks set to replace the comfortable predictability of a flat licence fee, and one interviewee went so far as to warn of a coming cost cliff for firms that have not planned for it.
“It arose again and again in our conversations for this report. While views differed, there was a consensus that trust and transparency were the key to costs and billing, in whatever form that was.”
The authors added: “We found that most clients now expect a firm to use the same tools they use themselves, and to use them well, while still being able to show, credibly, how a human being reviewed the output. That is not, in the end, a technology issue. It is a trust issue.
“What came through from both sides, though, was a shared – as yet untested – willingness to work it out.”