Over the past six months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity, revolutionizing the way we communicate and interact with technology. Programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard are powerful tools allowing users to generate suggestions, answers, and drafts of programming code, marketing ideas, and much more. As a result, AI has seen integration into the workplace of many different industries, including the legal profession. This has led many talking heads to claim that these new AI tools will cause everyone from programmers to accountants and even us lawyers to lose their jobs. The idea is, concerning the legal profession, that AI tools would be able to draft agreements and provide legal advice directly to clients without needing a lawyer.
To understand and prepare for our proclaimed eminent unemployment, we at The Rose Group have recently begun experimenting with Legal Focused AI Tools. However, we quickly learned that while these tools are both helpful and powerful, our jobs are still safe (for now). One tool used by our team assists us with drafting and reviewing different contracts and agreements. The tool processes user input and generates contextually relevant responses using a deep learning model trained on vast amounts of text data, including public contract databases. For example, we may ask the tool to “draft a short confidentiality clause for an asset purchase agreement” or “draft a definition of affiliate.” The AI then generates various options for us to incorporate into the agreement.
On one particular occasion, we requested the AI to assist with drafting a specific definition in a non-solicitation agreement. The AI created a cohesive, well-defined description that fit the agreement’s context. However, upon our review, we noticed that the definition failed to comply with a relatively recent Wisconsin case, Manitowoc Company, Inc. v. Lanning. We assumed that the AI had not been trained on this case and, as a result, was unaware of its existence and holdings.
This experience led us to conclude that AI is not yet advanced enough to replace human lawyers. While AI can provide helpful suggestions and ideas, it is ultimately up to us to make the final decision and approve its work. This “second pair of eyes” provided by AI allows us to improve our efficiency and results for our clients, but we still need a human to review and edit the AI’s work to ensure that it is up to our standards and compliant with the law. So, for now, it seems our jobs are safe. It’s possible that in a few years, AI might be able to draft a complete contract or even author an article like this, or maybe it has already accomplished that feat…
-Brendan Juno (or maybe ChatGPT?)