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Updated: In the fall of 2022, David Wakeling, head of law firm Allen & Overy’s Markets Innovation Group in London, got a glimpse of the future. Months before the release of ChatGPT, he demoed Harvey, a platform built on OpenAI’s GPT technology and tailored for major law firms.
“As I unpeel the onion, I could see this is pretty serious. I’ve been playing with tech for a long time. It’s the first time the hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Wakeling says.
Soon Allen & Overy became one of Harvey’s earliest adopters, announcing in March that 3,500 lawyers were using it across 43 offices. Then in March, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers announced a “strategic alliance” with the San Francisco-based startup, which recently secured $21 million in funding.
Other major law firms have adopted generative AI products at a breathtaking pace or are developing platforms in-house. DLA Piper partner and data scientist Bennett B. Borden calls the tech “the most transformative technology” since the computer. And it is well suited to lawyers because it can speed up mundane legal tasks, helping them focus on more meaningful work.
“If you think about its ability to gather, analyze and summarize lots of data, it’s a huge head start to any legal project,” says Borden, whose firm is using Casetext’s generative AI legal assistant, CoCounsel, for legal research, document review and contract analysis. (In June, Thomson Reuters announced it had agreed to purchase Casetext for $650 million.)
Yet, generative AI is forcing firms to wrestle with the risks of using the new technology, which is largely unregulated. In May, Gary Marcus, a leading expert on artificial intelligence, warned a U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law that even the makers of generative AI platforms “don’t entirely understand how they work.”
Firms and legal technology companies are confronting the unique security and privacy challenges that come with using the software and its tendency to produce inaccurate and biased answers."
This article was originally posted in the The ABA Journal
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