Artificial Intelligence

Part Two of a Multipart Article. Part One is here.Litigation involving AI rarely turns on abstract questions about the technology itself. Instead, disputes typically focus on how AI was deployed, what contractual promises govern its use and how responsibility for AI-driven outcomes is allocated between providers and customers.

Despite widespread investment into AI across the legal industry, just a small group of law firms are consistently realizing measurable returns in operational speed, financial visibility and revenue performance, according to a new report from Law.com and legal industry technology provider Elite.

Most firms are aiming their newest tools at the work they already do — pouring their most powerful technology into running the same tasks a little faster. But when everyone automates the same tasks at once, no one pulls ahead. That reaches the future a little faster while leaving a firm’s largest opportunity untouched — and that opportunity isn’t doing more of the existing work, but transforming how the high-value work gets done.

AI is becoming both an accelerant and a distraction for cybersecurity. In many respects, AI is acting as a stress test for existing security operations by exposing how difficult many organizations still find it to enforce basic controls consistently at scale.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly embedding itself into legal workflows, but much of the conversation treats all use cases as if they carry the same level of risk, even if they do not. The more useful question is not whether AI works, but where it can be safely applied and where it cannot.

AI-savvy lawyering is already something that clients are starting to demand. The technology is capable; the challenge now is cultural and organizational change.

There is a difference between deploying AI in an existing workflow and rethinking how legal work gets done. The organizations seeing more fundamental change are the ones redesigning their operating model around what the technology makes possible.

If junior attorneys are prevented from doing the hard work of rowing the oars by an entirely cost-efficient AI-model, they may lose the years of on-the-job training needed to become those experienced senior attorneys that can take the helm.