At the end of June last year, the attorneys for the plaintiff in the case Parker v Forsyth N.O. & Others, at the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court, were rapped over the knuckles for using ChatGPT as part of their legal research. The problem didn’t lie with the fact that they had used the chatbot, but that they’d accepted the results generated by the platform without verifying their accuracy. “It seems to the court that they placed undue faith in the veracity of the legal research generated by artificial intelligence and lazily omitted to verify the research,” the court judgment read.
But this isn’t deterring the profession from using AI tools to improve and augment the work they do. A recent survey from Dutch information services company Wolters Kluwer found that nearly three-quarters of lawyers plan to use GenAI in their day-to-day activities – for drafting contracts, writing legal memoranda or sifting through piles of case law. A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University found that legal services is among the industries most exposed to occupational change from generative AI. And research from economists at Goldman Sachs in 2023 estimated that 44% of legal work could be automated by AI tools.
While this might be the case, Aalia Manie, head of Webber Wentzel Fusion, the firm’s legal technology division, says that when it comes to more complex legal work requiring nuanced judgment, creativity, negotiation skills and emotional intelligence, AI should be seen as more of an enabler than a disruptor. It empowers lawyers by automating mundane tasks, freeing them up to focus on strategic advice, client interaction, negotiation and advocacy. “By embracing AI as a tool, lawyers can enhance their efficiency, productivity and overall value proposition,” she says. But as the case cited here shows, lawyers must verify AI-generated output and understand that it’s not a replacement for their expertise. “These cases serve as a reminder that AI, while powerful, is not infallible.”
Tristan Marot, an associate within the insurance advisory team who handles much of the AI advisory at Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa, says that lawyers need to become a lot more technologically adept. “If you want to find an industry that is technologically backwards, you need look no further than the legal industry, where a lot of senior practitioners still don’t know how to send an email themselves. They’ll dictate into a dictaphone and have their secretaries type it up and send it out.” But this kind of behaviour is becoming less acceptable, he says, and those who fail to keep pace will be pushed out of the market by those who are willing to embrace the change.
Legal dinosaurs
In traditional legal workflows, such as when a lawyer is sent a query from a client, GenAI has potential. Typically, a question will be sent to a senior practitioner, who will pass the query on to a junior attorney, who will do the research and compile a research memo. This then gets passed back up the chain, where it’s edited before being sent back to the client. This workflow, which is one of the ways in which junior attorneys are trained, is going to be disrupted, says Marot. But to be able to use AI tools effectively, you need to educate people about what it can and can’t do, he says, and understand how to prompt and compose your queries so that you can get the best results.
AI-powered e-discovery tools can quickly find relevant information without anyone having to spend hours sifting through thousands of documents. But a lot of law firms are worried about the accuracy of this approach, favouring human review over technology-enabled approaches. “I question if it’s any less risky giving 40 Lever Arch files to a first-year candidate attorney and expecting them to find the one email with the case winning quote,” says Marot.
Described on its website as a legal tech company, Legal Interact claims to have developed South Africa’s first AI lawyer. Designed to provide ordinary citizens with easy access to legal knowledge and justice, the My AI Lawyer platform promises to revolutionise the way legal services are delivered across the country. Raphael Segal, Legal Interact’s director, says its goal is not to replace traditional lawyers.
“My AI Lawyer is the digital extension of a human lawyer. We always want to keep the human in the loop. The tech is designed to be able to review a question, find content based on existing regulation and legislation and then respond with a curated answer.”
Giving me a brief demo of how the platform works, Segal asks the My AI Lawyer WhatsApp chatbot to give him some legal advice around how to properly deal with his noisy neighbour. Immediately, the platform replies with steps he can take to handle the situation and gives him the option to ask more questions or to connect with a human. After a few additional questions and some back and forth, the platform generates a letter that Segal can send to his neighbour about the issue, listing his legal rights, and emails him a copy so that he can easily forward it on.
Drawing on years of experience providing legal advice to the accounting and legal community, the platform was launched in March last year. It was designed and developed in-house by Legal Interact and Legal&Tax and is hosted on Azure. The content informing these interactions is based on data from recent cases and legal proceedings. According to Segal, My AI Lawyer was inspired by experiences he and his team had while interacting with a local charity called Matla A Bana, which supports children who report abuse. In their interactions with the non-profit, they realised that South Africa desperately needs a service that offers simple and clear legal advice to those who need it most. There’s no cost to try out the platform, but more regular use is R49 per month for anyone who isn’t already a Legal Interact and Legal&Tax customer.
Legal solutions
A solution such as this, says Marot, if designed and built properly, could prove effective as a first port of call, and more cost-effective than consulting a lawyer if it isn’t necessary in the first place. He says that none of the legal solutions and technologies currently available can provide a complete enough answer to be considered sound legal advice. But, “we’re going to get there in the next couple of years, which means that lawyers need to figure out how to adapt. At the moment, it’s definitely not a case of AI making lawyers redundant, but it is a case of lawyers who use AI making lawyers who don’t, redundant.”
But they will need to use AI with care. In the case of the abovementioned Parker v Forsyth N.O. & Others, the court offered some sound advice, in that “in this age of instant gratification, this incident serves as a timely reminder to, at least, the lawyers involved in this matter that when it comes to legal research, the efficiency of modern technology still needs to be infused with a dose of good, old-fashioned independent reading,” the judgment notes.
“Courts expect lawyers to bring a legally independent and questioning mind to bear on, especially, novel legal matters, and certainly not to merely repeat in parrot-fashion, the unverified research of a chatbot.”
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za