AI explained: AI and law firms

Gregor Pryor of Reed Smith’s Entertainment & Media Group in London describes why it’s important for law firms to train their lawyers in how to use AI. Although AI-powered tools do not exceed living lawyers in all aspects of legal practice, their powers of calculation bring immense yields in efficiency and can be a powerful accelerator for law firms delivering services. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day. Gregor: Hi, everybody, and welcome to our new series on artificial intelligence. Over the coming months, we'll explore some of the key challenges and opportunities within the rapidly evolving AI landscape. And today we're going to focus on artificial intelligence within law firms and hopefully give a bit more context about how Reed Smith is deploying artificial intelligence in the delivery of its services to clients. The first thing I would say is that certainly in my day job as an entertainment lawyer, AI has been a very controversial subject, mostly as it pertains to training. And as we'll discover as I explain more about how Reed Smith is using AI, training and the ability for law firms to use data that it obtains, is highly contingent on clients agreeing to that training or being comfortable with the manner in which law firms are deploying the technology to improve and make their services more efficient. So the first thing I want to talk about is how we are using AI and what our future plans are. So there's a whole lot of buzz and hype, I think, about how AI is impacting the way that law firms are operating. There's been a number of surveys. phase, most of them say that AI will transform the business of law and having been in the business of law for 25 years. I've heard that for the whole 25 years, but now feels like the time when it actually is happening and the decisions that firms are making to adopt AI are having an impact on how they perform. Most of the global 200 firms have policies about how they use generative AI. There's a high level of governance and risk management concerning client data, as I mentioned. But not all of those firms have a policy concerning how they use AI. We've been working and have worked on ours for a number of years and continue to iterate as the technology improves and client perspectives on the use of AI change. We think that there's likely a gap between preparedness and managing risk and the implementation of AI and we've been being very careful as we prepare our infrastructure to integrate and use AI carefully. Obviously the bigger the law firm, the more they are able to leverage AI and invest, but not that many firms are working with clients on AI projects. We've just finished a trial of about seven different providers. We've used them on a beta basis through limited rollout. We're not putting all our eggs in one basket. We're trying to figure out which AI has proper utility, which machines generate real-time efficiencies and help us in the delivery of our service. I think it's fair to say that some of them are nowhere near as impressive as we'd hoped, but we are still continuing to invest. One of the things that we've been very careful about is organizing our data and making sure it's hygienic. That means not using client data for AI without permission and also making sure that we have organized ourselves so that our data doesn't get unnecessarily or incorrectly commingled. One of the other topics that comes up is how AI can improve efficiency and productivity. I think there's some really obvious ways, such as summarizing documents, helping translate things, creating text or drafting. It ge