Dive Brief:
- Most corporations generate enormous “data pools” that can be better organized and mined for business intelligence and to aid strategic decisions, according to a legal tech data and generative AI expert. “All companies and law firms need better intelligence,” said Jen Stringfield, a subject matter advisor on artificial intelligence with LexisNexis, the data analytics company.
- The “tide has shifted” on the legal profession’s view of AI tools, with most chief legal officers expecting a “positive impact” on ameliorating the workload and budgetary issues that affect most in-house legal departments, she said Wednesday in a webinar sponsored by LexisNexis and ALM Media. “All of them are under cost pressures.”
- More sophisticated AI tools will lead to “a pretty quick stratification” of lawyers’ skills in coming years as basic and routine legal tasks shift to AI, leaving lawyers more focused on strategic work and greater proficiency within their specialty area, Stringfield predicts.
Dive Insight:
In-house legal departments have committed to AI tools as CLOs strongly believe that the software will fuel efficiencies for their understaffed departments and help to contain outside counsel spending, she said, citing data from the most recent Association of Corporate Counsel’s annual CLO survey.
“I think the answer to the time and money issue comes down to the use and the leveraging of AI,” said Stringfield, a former practicing lawyer who specialized in intellectual property. “That cost and speed pressure hits legal departments, of course, and that gets passed onto the law firms. We all know lawyers need to do a good job fast and as inexpensively as possible.”
Large companies have huge volumes of information about their operations, employees, customers and other areas, most of it collected separately and unorganized. Globally, people will generate 181 zettabytes of information in 2025, according to an estimate from software company Domo. A zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, or 10^21 bytes.
An estimated 80% of all data is unstructured, Stringfield said. For corporate purposes, that means a lack of insight for legal chiefs and other executives to help drive decisions. She said the goal for increased business intelligence is “moving up and beyond having a data lake and doing something with that information.”
Once a company structures its data to provide insights, genAI tools perform well in the areas of search, analytics and data visualization, Stringfield said. (LexisNexis sells a legal genAI tool.)
- Search - The most basic function is using algorithms to parse out data, analyze it and then extract insights from that information.
- Analytics - Uses massive datasets to predict behaviors and outcomes. For example, the AI can predict the likelihood of a settlement given facts, jurisdiction, and parties or how a particular court might rule on a given matter, she said.
- Data visualization - Takes search data and creates images, “something we can process much faster than text,” she said.
GenAI has enjoyed much faster adoption than prior eras of new technology tools, with genAI now above 30% adoption in legal services in less than two years, she said, dating from the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Cloud computing, with products like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, took more than a decade to reach a 30% adoption level, she said.
“The appetite in the legal industry for genAI, and the broader market, has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Stringfield said.
As for the future of AI in the legal world, with massive transformation widely predicted, these tools are likely to cause “a stratification of skill sets within legal departments,” she said.
Tasks that currently “feel like drudgery” to a lawyer are likely to be offloaded to the AI, allowing more time for them to delve into deeper and more substantive legal work, Stringfield said. “We’re going to see people become experts in their field much, much earlier in their career.”
