Will AI Make Lawyers Richer or Put Them Out of Work?
Large-language models aren’t taking over legal work — yet — but they will most likely disrupt the profession’s billing model.
Billing by the hour could become a relic.
Photographer: Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The potential for generative artificial intelligence to transform the legal profession was obvious even before OpenAI’s ChatGPT appeared on the scene in 2022. What large-language models do — plow through huge quantities of text and data and come up with convincing-sounding things to say about them — is similar to what many lawyers do. But numerous attorneys and judges have learned to their great embarrassment that ChatGPT and other LLMs do not confine themselves to existing case law when making legal arguments, often inventing references and quotes instead.
“You’ve got this really clear use case in legal, except that these models, these foundational models, they’re built around efficiency, not accuracy,” Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive officer of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, a large provider of information and services to lawyers, told me a few weeks ago. “As a matter of fact, they don’t really deal in the truth. They deal in probabilities, and then they make plausible arguments.”