<p><span class="p-body">Artificial intelligence has already proven that it will alter many industries, including the legal profession. In fact, a wide range of legal tasks are already being automated, and naturally, a mountain of ethical issues will require thoughtful debate and examination.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">In March 2023, Bill Gates declared AI the “most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.”<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn1" target="_blank">[1]</a>&nbsp;While there is no denying that artificial intelligence is a revolutionary development, not everyone is as enthusiastic about its application as Mr. Gates. There are social concerns that must be addressed, not to mention the wide ramifications of AI in the law community, including patent and copyright law, privacy, and others not yet contemplated. The advantages and disadvantages of this quickly developing technology will be discussed in this article, plus an evaluation of the legal ’profession’s position on its integration into the practice of law.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 is now intelligent enough to successfully pass the bar exam, with a top 10% score – better than most law school graduates. Although interesting at face value, what lies below is both startling and compelling. GPT-4 is considered five times more powerful than its predecessors and, just a few months ago, was unable to pass the bar exam.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn2" target="_blank">[2]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">OpenAI is the creator of several artificial intelligence systems transforming our civilization, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex. ChatGPT boasts the most successful product launch in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn3" target="_blank">[3]</a>&nbsp;The speed of AI’s user adoption is eye-popping. For perspective, what took ChatGPT two months to achieve took Facebook and Instagram four-and-a-half years and two years, respectively.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">It is predicted that by 2030, AI will generate $13 trillion for the global economy while boosting the global GDP by 14 percent.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn4" target="_blank">[4]</a>&nbsp;Interestingly, Gartner predicts that although AI will eliminate certain types of jobs (i.e., legal assistants), new jobs will be created because of AI, thus resulting in a net increase in employment.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn5" target="_blank">[5]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body"><b>Benefits to the Profession of Law</b></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">The legal field will benefit from AI in many ways, such as automating work that is done repeatedly, predicting how a case will turn out, and providing lawyers with data about legal trends and patterns. AI-powered software will create efficiencies when reviewing documents, locating pertinent cases, statutes, and regulations, conducting legal research, and even contract analysis. Naturally, AI has the potential to positively impact a law firm’s bottom line. Moreover, clients will benefit from more precise and effective legal services, quicker access to legal information, and lower legal service fees.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">OpenAI recently invested in Harvey AI, a system that facilitates legal work based on a GPT variant created by OpenAI. Harvey AI was most recently trained with general legal information, including case law and reference documents, after initially learning from general internet data. To start, Harvey AI will assist lawyers with contract analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance. Harvey AI can also aid in producing insights, suggestions, and forecasts based on data.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Allen &amp; Overy and Harvey AI revealed their collaboration in February 2023. Since then, Harvey AI has been questioned more than 40,000 times by the 3,500-lawyer company with 43 offices. Interestingly, 25% of the attorneys in the firm have embraced the new technology and participate in an “alignment” system by checking and validating everything that comes out of the Harvey AI system. Achieving behavioral alignment between an AI system’s human operators or authors is known as “alignment” in the context of artificial intelligence. In general, the objective is to stop AI from acting in ways that are detrimental to human interests.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body"><b>A Positive Impact on the Justice Gap</b></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Artificial intelligence will provide individuals from low-economic communities with more access to legal counsel. The gulf between legal requirements and access to legal services is known as the justice gap.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Most at-risk groups in New York are principally affected by this disparity, with minorities and those from low-income areas being disproportionately affected. In fact, most people still believe hiring a lawyer is expensive. Eighty percent of those with low incomes are unable to pay for legal counsel, and even the middle class faces difficulties. For example, 40–60% of the middle class’s legal requirements go unfulfilled.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn6" target="_blank">[6]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Consider AI’s value in the healthcare sector. New York State’s Permanent Commission on Access to Justice’s mission is to expand access to civil legal services. The commission’s November 2022 report found that 99% of patients remained without legal representation, highlighting a staggering 98% success rate for civil medical debt cases won on default. The report determined that hospitals are suing patients, mainly minority patients from low-income zip codes.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn7" target="_blank">[7]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">DoNotPay is widely considered “the World’s First Robot Lawyer,” and according to its CEO, Joshua Browder, the company has successfully resolved more than 2 million cases by utilizing AI technology. Moreover, DoNotPay currently maintains hundreds of thousands of active subscribers and predicts legal conflict resolution of medical bills will play a central role in the business’s core focus. Indeed, a harbinger for the legal industry.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body"><b>AI Safety</b></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Are we releasing new large language models of AI into the public responsibly? Many argue that we are not. In fact, a new report affirms that 50% of AI researchers believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will go extinct from our inability to control AI. Consider this: would you give a prescribed medication to your child without the endorsement from the entire medical community?<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn8" target="_blank">[8]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">The legal community has time to contemplate the most effective ways to use the new technology for business purposes and to establish meaningful ethical standards since we are currently in the early stages of AI’s development. However, large language models like GPT-4 can teach themselves by utilizing massive data inputs through the lens of text and even synthesizing the relationships between the data inputs. To align AI’s outputs with factual information and, further, to prioritize outputs, OpenAI has devised a system rooted in a massive amount of human feedback – essentially a rating system dubbed “RLHF,” Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. But naturally, this process can be very subjective, entirely based on the opinion of the human providing the output’s rating.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Typically, our laws evolve with invention, and AI requires thoughtful policy development, legal application, and regulation. Consider Justice Brandeis’ role in evolving the right to privacy as new technologies like wiretapping and photography were invented.<a href="https://nysba.org/artificial-intelligence-presents-oppor-tunities-and-challenges-for-the-legal-ecosystem/#_edn9" target="_blank">[9]</a></span></p> <p><span class="p-body">One of the biggest shifts on the horizon applies to authentication verification. Today, deep fakes (audio and video content impersonating an individual) require only three seconds of voice audio to fully create new content in that individual’s likeness. Institutions that currently use audio and/or video content-based verification, like the banking sector, are at risk.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Many people are concerned about how quickly AI will permeate our everyday lives and the difficulties it will present, such as its propensity for bias. Naturally, biased data inputs lead to biased data outputs and, in turn, can result in the denial of legal help to certain racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups. Additionally, there are concerns surrounding data protection and privacy rights. Finally, attorneys, legal assistants, and other staffers within the legal profession’s ecosystem are concerned about being rendered nullified.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Since AI is still in its infancy, we have time to think about how people will use these tools before the legal community has a chance to decide precisely what to do.</span></p> <p><span class="p-body">Marc Beckman is the best-selling author of Comprehensive Guide: NFTs, Digital Artwork, and Blockchain Technology. He is a senior metaverse fellow and adjunct professor at New York University and a consultant to the New York State Bar Association’s Task Force on Emerging Digital Finance and Currency. Beckman earned his J.D. from Hofstra University School of Law (now the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University). As CEO of DMA United, Beckman has launched several Web3 programs for brands worldwide.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>