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David Wakeling, head of the market innovation group at London-based law firm Allen & Overy, first encountered law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. Several of his firm’s attorneys used the system to answer simple legal questions, draft documents, and get first-pass messages to clients.
Wakeling says the trial started small but quickly ballooned. About 3,500 employees in his 43 offices at the company ended up using the tool, performing a total of about 40,000 queries. The law firm now has partnerships across the company to help him use AI tools more broadly, but Wakeling declined to disclose the value of the deal. According to Harvey, one in four of him on the Allen & Overy attorney team uses the AI platform every day, and 80% use it at least once a month. Other large law firms have also started adopting the platform, the company said.
The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been predicted many times before. But with the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at the forefront, people within the industry are more convinced than ever.
“I think this is the beginning of a paradigm shift,” says Wakeling. “I think this technology is very well suited for the legal industry.”
Generative AI is having a cultural and commercial moment, being touted as the future of search, sparking legal disputes over copyrights and causing panic in schools and colleges.
This technique, which learns to generate natural-looking photos and text using large datasets, may be suitable for the legal industry, which relies heavily on standardized documents and case law.
Lillian Edwards, Professor of Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University said: “Automated legal document generation has been a growing field for decades, even in the era of rules-based technology. The result is much more predictable than most free text output, as it is available as a free text output.
But the problems with the current generation of generative AI are already starting to emerge. Most important is the tendency to build things up with confidence, or to “hallucinate”. That’s problematic enough in search, but by law, the difference between success and failure can be severe and costly.
