The year 2023 has been a whirlwind on the tech front. It is easy to forget that all this happened in just a year because it truly was a lot – hence below is a summary of three key trends shaping innovative lawyering, legal design, legal tech, and legal education sphere.
We will take a look at Generative AI (of course), how legal education has been putting up with the rollercoaster, and how legal design may be slowly but surely coming of age.
2023 was the year when a lot of lawyers were freaking out about Generative AI
Although the ChatGPT was widely available for tinkering as of the end of 2022, it felt like there was a full attack on the castle as of 2023.
Here is a little tour of headlines, just to underscore how much has happened in a year:
- GPT 3.5 took the US Bar Exam and failed (lawyers sigh with relief),
- GPT4 successfully took the US Bar Exam and scored in the 90th percentile (lawyers are panicking),
- An explosive Goldman Sachs Report estimated that 44% of legal work could be automated,
- Thomson Reuters acquired the legal AI assistant Casetext for a whooping $650m amidst somehow slower legal tech M&A activity,
- Harvey, the law-trained GPT became a household name in law firms and secured hefty Series A and Series B investment rounds,
- Allen&Overy broke the legal internet with their bombshell announcement that they have actually been using Harvey for a while already,
- Dentons announced a client-secure version of ChatGPT,
- A lawyer got caught citing fake cases supplemented by ChatGPT before Federal Court,
- Ironclad launched AI Assist powered features (alongside basically every other app imaginable),
- Mishcon de Reya was hiring for a Legal Prompt Engineer,
- Luminance Showcased World’s First Completely AI-Powered Contract Negotiation,
- EU has been doing its procedural magic while working on the AI act.
It was (and is) hype left and right, with an abundance of prompt engineering online courses, thought leadership, and a huge heap of existential angst. We learned words such as hallucinate, bossed our own GPTs, and kept on hearing stuff like “AI will not replace lawyers, lawyers using AI will” and “did you know that this text was actually generated by ChatGPT” over and over again. Lawyers briefly stopped correcting each other to poke holes into generated answers.
The legal world was searching for use cases – any use cases (including the NDA reviewer we prototyped at the Prague AI Hackathon). The culture around trying new and unexpected experiments with the technology somehow reminded me of the early days of the lockdown, when everyone started to bake over-the-top bread.
By the end of the year, it felt like some were already falling into the trough of disillusionment. Some started to realize that it is really hard to use AI sensibly and safely if you do not have well-managed and accessible data and appropriate safeguards, and a lot of the benefit lies beyond the somewhat familiar chat window.
Perhaps wide, reasonable, and measured use of Generative AI in law will be in the books for next year. Or the one after that.
Let’s just hope we don’t stop asking the hard questions.
Legal Education got into the spotlight
The advancements in Generative AI put law schools in a somewhat peculiar position as well. If a machine can pass the Bar Exam that is at least on paper supposed to prove the aptitude of lawyers, (a) the test is either nothing but a technocratic act of gatekeeping or (b) lawyers can be indeed made obsolete by the daring GPT.
The solution to (a) will take a lot more time, as it is between deregulation and better tests – and I don’t think that the bar exams are going to become any more reflective of the reality of legal practice any time soon. Turning to (b): there was a lot of talk about what skills will be necessary for the future generation to thrive if all the grind is taken up by the machine.
That is if the newcomers choose to practice law, at all.
Ultimately, empathy, human skills, and legal design seem to be winning the skills debate, and the number of design-oriented programs is on a slow rise, as evidenced by this list by the Legal Design Desk.
One step further, some universities are keen to surf the Generative AI wave: Cat Moon and Mark Williams started the Vanderbilt University Artificial Intelligence Law Lab. Josh Kubicki, formerly of the University of Richmond School of Law has taken over the steering wheel of the Generative AI debate with his Brainyacts newsletter.
All that happening while universities are navigating how to deal with GPT-induced plagiarism (and experimenting with how to keep essays relevant), debates if GPTs should be invited to or banned from the classrooms, and trying to help teachers and educators stay on top of all the many new developments in order to keep up with the digital native Gen Z.
Needless to say these trembles were felt elsewhere both outside and inside the legal market. Even L&D professionals were experiencing similar struggles.
At Charles University, we did two full semesters of Modern Lawyers, a legal innovation, tech, and design, data-driven course. In terms of Generative AI, there is a significant rise in how sophisticated the students’ final projects are becoming. While in December 2022, we used ChatGPT to create study plans, in December 2023 students were using it to prep code for a full website or geographical data visualization, completely on their own. In this case, Generative AI has unequivocally been a hyperdrive.
Legal Design: journey to maturity
The Legal Design tribe has been summoned this year to the Legal Design Summit in Helsinki. The rising number of voices, practitioners, and case studies indicated that the niche is alive and well. Among the speakers, there was still a dominance of consultants treating legal design as a product rather than in-house teams making it a long-term institutional phenomenon, an imbalance characteristic of the relatively new and attractive field that is all about experimenting. Big Law showed up as sponsors, speakers, and audience. The notorious Post-it has made an appearance more than a few times; legal operations were barely mentioned.
Everyone who is into making law a more enjoyable product had their hurrah moment when the plain language ISO standard was issued.
Finally, on this pathway towards maturity, the big news is the launch of the Legal Design Journal, the first official academic journal with a focus specifically on Legal Design. As Michael Doherty, the new Editor-in-Chief described as the place where you don’t have to dedicate the first half of your paper to explain, what legal design actually is. In other words, legal design is moving out of the parents’ house in a bid toward intellectual and functional autonomy.
A big thank you to all readers and subscribers
This was 2023!
I just wanted to thank you for supporting this blog, every comment, and every cup of coffee I drank alone or with some of you thanks to this venture.
Have a very happy new year 2024!
Baru
