How Law Firms Can Implement AI the Right Way

The Modern Law Firm series delves into how AI can streamline your law firm — whether it’s by saving you time and money, eliminating mistakes and redundancies or making your workflow more efficient. 

AI has the ability to be a game changer within the legal industry—but only if law firms utilize it correctly. 

In 2023, a personal injury lawyer used ChatGPT to help with a case. Unfortunately for him, the AI program gave him false information that he cited in court. While AI is useful and can eliminate tedious, repetitive work, it is not a replacement for legal professionals.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t implement AI into your workflow; it just means you have to put systems in place to help you avoid any snafus. 

Why Law Firms Bother With AI in the First Place

As one personal injury lawyer showed, using AI requires care. So why bother with it in the first place? AI can simplify legal teams’ work and allow them to focus their attention on the tasks they are best at handling, which can eliminate responsibilities like following up and providing updates.

According to The Economist, AI can truly transform the legal industry. “According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, a bank, 44% of legal tasks could be performed by AI, more than in any occupation surveyed except for clerical and administrative support,” the outlet reports. “Lawyers spend an awful lot of time [scrutinizing] tedious documents—the sort of thing that AI has already demonstrated it can do well. Lawyers use AI for a variety of tasks, including due diligence, research and data analytics. These applications have largely relied on ‘extractive’ AI, which, as the name suggests, extracts information from a text, answering specific questions about its contents.” 

AI and Ethical Considerations For Your Law Firm

For all the positives that AI can bring to your firm, there are also some ethical concerns. If you plan to use AI in your firm, consider: 

Privacy

AI systems learn through data, so it’s important that it’s not using your clients’ data in ways that it should not or making it available to other parties. 

Bias and Discrimination

AI can discriminate or have biases against women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, so it’s imperative that you are not using systems that do not treat everyone equally.

Consent

Clients should know you’re using AI for their cases and how it might impact outcomes. It’s possible that a client does not feel comfortable with or trusting of AI. 

How to Remain Ethical While Using AI in Your Law Firm

You can adopt AI and remain ethical. Here’s how: 

Set Clear Guidelines 

Before you add AI to your workflow, set clear guidelines of how you will use these programs. Determine when it’s appropriate to use, how you will handle client’s privacy information and how you will communicate it with them, how to add new programs and any other factors that can affect your firm. Writing this information down is also necessary because it gives the entire team insight into how your firm is handling AI and what’s appropriate for them to do.

Analyze Your Systems, Often

Reviewing the tools you use frequently can ensure that you catch biased and discriminatory actions and that the tool is working as it should for you. 

Review AI’s Work

While AI should help make your work easier, you shouldn’t rely on it to do your work with no oversight. This can lead to errors. 

Take Accountability

The person who is ultimately responsible for a case is the lawyer. This can serve as a reminder that you cannot fault AI for any errors that occur because you should be reviewing the work. 

Look for Transparency

You must know how an AI tool makes decisions and how it operates. AI companies should lay out this information. Otherwise, you will be putting trust in a system that you don’t understand and that can spell trouble. 

Have a Backup Plan

Have a plan B in case a client doesn’t want to use AI or a system is temporarily down. Not having a plan in place can disrupt your work in the case of an emergency.