Legal Enters Full Education Mode as Generative AI Strengthens its Hold on the Industry

Each week, the Law.com Barometer newsletter, powered by the ALM Global Newsroom and Legalweek brings you the trends, disruptions, and shifts our reporters and editors are tracking through coverage spanning every beat and region across the ALM Global Newsroom. The micro-topic coverage will not only help you navigate the changing legal landscape but also prepare you to discuss these shifts with thousands of legal leaders at Legalweek 2024, taking place from January 29 to February 1, 2024, in New York City. Learn more and register today:

The Shift: Legal Enters Full Education Mode as Generative AI Strengthens its Hold on the Industry

The vast majority of lawyers left education behind once they had their law school diplomas and bar exam passing scores in hand. Indeed, many legal professionals have established themselves as the experts who serve to educate others.

The generative AI boom has turned that all on its head.

Now, legal professionals are scrambling to get their hands on educational resources that will help them adapt to the generative AI revolution and come out ahead, harnessing all the potential the powerful new technology has to offer.

Perhaps most notably of all, the thirst for education has the industry doing something they almost never do: collaborating with the competition.

The Conversation

Generative AI education for lawyers is coming from several directions at once. As they have in the past, many technology providers are offering the education necessary to get the most out of their tools and software. The difference this time, though, is that the users are readily taking them up on it.

“The folks building the technology a lot of times are the leading experts on early-stage technology. So it’s good for the marketplace and good for the industry for them to open up and tell what they know. Because they are living and breathing this stuff,” said Brad Blickstein, founder and principal of Blickstein Group and NewLaw Practice co-head at Baretz+Brunelle.

Legal professionals are viewing vendor-provided education as not only an opportunity to deepen their understanding of generative AI, but also as a chance to peek behind the curtain and see different providers’ approaches to large language models (LLMs).

“The more familiar you become with the concepts, the greater control you have over the vocabulary,” said James Sherer, co-lead of the Emerging Technology team of BakerHostetler’s Digital Assets and Data Management group and director of the firm’s Artificial Intelligence and Information Governance engagements. “The more you see, the more you engage, I think the easier it becomes to distinguish fact from fiction, marketing buzz from real world application, you can become a better connoisseur.”

Peter Geovanes, chief innovation and AI officer at McGuireWoods, considers these educational resources to be a “win-win” for lawyers and providers, because it adds to relationship-building in the generative AI space. “I think that’s why [providers are] so open to wanting to partner right now, because they want as many legal practitioners to get comfortable with this to understand it and then together, I think we can really push the envelope,” Geovanes said.

The education wave hasn’t only hit established legal professionals. Organizations and educational institutions have also started to recognize the need to educate future lawyers as well. For example, this summer, the innovation team at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe worked with legal education provider AltaClaro to develop a new learning module to train its summer associate class in the generative AI skill of prompt engineering, with plans to roll out the training to more Orrick professionals in the future.

“We’ve been very focused on generative AI [at Orrick], and we’re sort of in the active testing phase,” said Kate Orr, global head of practice innovation at Orrick. “We’re now understanding how generative AI works, what its limitations are, educating our lawyers and staff about those limitations and testing tools as they hit the market, so that we can also be ready and be comfortable with the technology and understand how it works when the market is mature and the tools are ready.”

The Orrick initiative has sparked interest at other top firms. “The interest is there,” said Abdi Shayesteh, CEO and founder of AltaClaro. “We were having calls every day around it.”

Indeed, just this month, eleven global law firms announced a generative AI training consortium with law firm training provider SkillBurst, which provides training modules that give legal professionals “the basics” on how to effectively use emerging generative AI tools. SkillBurst sees the initiative as a vendor-agnostic alternative for AI education.

“The legal tech vendors are instrumental; they’re the ones creating these tools that everyone is going to use, but they are not experts in learning content for lawyers and law firms,” Anusia Gillespie, chief strategy and growth officer at SkillBurst, said. “There needs to be a neutral third-party content that is delivered internally so the people feel it’s a firm initiative, not a specific product training.”

Meanwhile, law schools are also getting involved in the push for more generative AI education. Generative AI-powered contract drafting and negotiation platform Spellbook launched an AI Access Program to provide free AI education to law school faculty and students globally. This summer, Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which is Harvard’s research center focused on the study of cyberspace, announced the launch of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (IAIL).

In addition, in the spring, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and McCormick School of Engineering hosted the first installment of their new IMPACT Executive Education series with a session focused on how ChatGPT and generative AI could change legal services.

The Significance

When it comes to getting up to speed on generative AI, competitors have become collaborators in a way the industry has not previously witnessed.

The SkillBurst generative AI training consortium is a prime example of parties who are typically opposed to each other working together. “These firms are competitors … but they’re actually itching for some community here,” said SkillBurst CEO Steve Gluckman.

This anomaly has manifested itself in the emergence of invite-only, closed-door sessions, largely operated under Chatham House Rule, where legal’s first movers on generative AI are having candid conversations about how they’re working with generative AI, where they’re succeeding and where they’re failing.

The first took place at Stanford University’s annual CodeX Future Law conference in April 2023, which added a second workshop day where people discussed generative AI’s use in law at a very technical level. In contrast was the Harvard Law AI Summit in September, where the focus was highly academic and theoretical about what generative AI might be able to achieve in the legal profession.

Along with the technical and academic approaches, the third leg of the three-legged stool of invite-only generative AI legal events so far this year was a free, invite-only, nonsponsored gathering in New York in September, organized by legal innovation accelerator LexFusion and hosted at the office of an Am Law 15 law firm, which focused on the practical application of generative AI in legal.

The full-day, closed-door discussion saw representatives of 40 major law departments, 40 major law firms and other top industry professionals having candid discussions about real-world use cases that are already being pursued. As one presenter put it, being in the room felt like being part of the “collective brain trust around how we can think about leveraging [generative AI] to accelerate the amazing work that the legal field does,” and how the whole industry is coming together to troubleshoot the major issues that arise as generative AI is rolled out in legal practice and advice.

Alma Asay, Chief Innovation and Value Officer at Crowell & Moring noted that “the event fostered a spirit of excitement firmly rooted in practicality,” without all the typical buzzwords. Joe Green, chief innovation officer at Gunderson Dettmer, also noted that the event was different from most legal tech conferences, where “people are speaking in generalities [because] they know that there are press and competitors around.”

For many attendees, the takeaway feeling was that legal is in the midst of a grand and valuable experiment when it comes to generative AI, and that the industry will only succeed in that experiment if all the different players in the industry, who have historically been at odds, work together and learn from each other. “Truly candid conversations with other leaders across the legal ecosystem are the ‘secret sauce’ to increase adoption and success with gen AI solutions,” said Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal Innovation Counsel at Marsh McClennan.

The Information

Want to know more? Here's what we've discovered in the ALM Global Newsroom:

The Forecast

The momentum behind generative AI in legal won’t be slowing down any time soon – if anything, it’s only likely to increase.

For those who want to be on board, leaning into education now is crucial. It’s an unprecedented moment when, rather than striving to leave their competitors in the dust, the industry is embracing the importance of collaboration.

By all accounts, we’re still a couple years from starting to see the true ROI on generative AI in legal work. In that time, expect to see more cooperation than competition from those who are invested in seeing the technology succeed.

Stephanie Wilkins is the Editor-in-Chieft of Legaltech News. Contact her at swilkins@alm.com and follow her on LinkedIn.