There has certainly been plenty of chat about ChatGPT’s effect on the law and the ‘rise of the robot lawyer’ and so forth.
And according to a recent interview on CNBC with Geoff Lewis, (pictured below) a founder and managing partner of Bedrock Capital, there is an AI day of reckoning coming for lawyers.
“I talk to folks who spend tens of thousands of dollars a week on legal bills,” he said in the interview.
“They’re already using ChatGPT to generate complex contracts. I think the legal field is in a lot of trouble”.
There have been many articles about the change coming fast from legal AI advances.
Some are already taking matters too far, like personal injury lawyer Steven Schwartz who used ChatGPT to prepare court filings and created a motion replete with made-up case history, quotations and rulings.
The lesson to take care is certainly there, but as The Economist recently reported, the lesson is also the wrong one to learn to the extent that the fault lay with the lawyer, rather than the AI tool used to create it.
“For that is what ai is: neither a fad nor an apocalypse, but a tool in its infancy—and one that could radically change how lawyers work and law firms make money,” the Economist said.
AI is coming, as the New York Times also wrote, for the lawyers – again.
But this time lawyers need to use it, rather than be supplanted by it. If people like Geoff Lewis and others believe the legal AI could spell the end of lawyers, then maybe it is the warning shot that needs to be heeded, rather than ignored.
