Sorry… ….actually I’m not sorry this is absolute tosh and dangerous tosh at that.
First, here’s McKinsey running the same line only 6 weeks or so ago
Biggest Losers of AI Boom Are Knowledge Workers, McKinsey Says
I was just having this discussion with a US State law librarian only this morning.
We both agreed it is fear mongering both by consultancies and the major legal publishers (actually they aren’t publishers they are just database managers and average ones at that) to have access to and completely control the information facilities of law firms, government departments, the courts on the back of managers and partners who are led to believe these organisations will cut their costs.
Do you really want these corporations completely controlling information mangement with your firms, departments and organisations.
if you do you must be crazy, bonkers, insane, need any more adjectives? .
These organisations want your budget and they want your soul and the last gatekeeper is the lovely lonely law librarian of yore.
Let’s remember that this is how they operated the same lie from print to CD to database,
They told you it was going to be cheaper and more efficient in some cases this is true but that’s more a factor of time and technologies developed by others than anything they actually did themselves.
Also, remember, they are in the main buying in AI systems developed by others, the usual modus operandi in play again. They don’t know the biases, they don’t know the flaws all they know is that it’ll boost their and their shareholders revenue (dividends) at your expense.
Any smart law firm, legal govt dept, court system will be developing their own AI so if there is bias at least they will be generally aware what they are and how they can be managed
We say beware the “REPORT” its just the start of the fear mongering process that the giant database corporations use to slowly chip away at reality and get to their target. And ….yes, always make sure the report appears just before the AALL annual shindig to try and control the discussion and the message from the outset. Better that AAL members be discussing their worries about their future in the industry rather than active solutions to counter the latest play by legal database corporations.
This behaviour we’d expect of you know who and you know who although i have to say with WK it somewhat disappoints me.
Over the last 20 years i’ve seen them climb out of the hole of almost being irrelevant with the help of some amazing individuals, women in the main. Time to namecheck McKinstry and former Euro head Nagano who played a mjaor part of defining a new publisher, yes that dirty word, publisher. One can now see that the North American arm is completely controlled by the same ilk as the others.
Will V-Lex be the saviour of legal publishing going into the next decade with the work they did on AI way before it was chat GPT / Open AI fashionable. One has to hope they stay sane because it isn’t really public discussion yet but the thought of a few corporations owning information control over the law via the tool of AI moves us into an amalgamation of Burroughs, Huxley’s & Orwells worst literary nighmares and I for one am not interested in living in that world and terrified that my child may have to.
Ambrogi reports somewhat more dispassionately than I
Barely a week before the American Association of Law Libraries descends on Boston for its annual convention, a survey out today of legal professionals views on generative AI finds finds that a majority of them believe that librarians and others involved in knowledge management and research are at risk of obsolescence.
In the survey of 275 legal professionals conducted by Wolters Kluwer and Above the Law, Generative AI in the Law: Where Could This All Be Headed?, two thirds of respondents said they believe document review lawyers, librarians, and others involved in knowledge management and research could be replaced by generative AI.
Forty percent said paralegals are also at risk.
The jobs of law firm partners are safest, the survey concludes, but certain practice areas are more likely to be impacted by generative AI, respondents believe.
Practice areas most likely to be impacted include corporate, trust and estates, litigation, intellectual property, and tax. Those least likely to be impacted are energy, criminal law, environmental, healthcare, government, antitrust, and family.
“The responses suggest that corporate work may lend itself to AI, and one can imagine an AI program entirely handling a search for prior art in a patent prosecution,” the survey says.
Not surprisingly, the survey’s respondents say that the greatest benefit of generative AI for legal professionals will be in relieving them from mundane and routine work. More than 80 percent agree that generative AI will create “transformative efficiencies” for research and routine tasks, and 44 percent strongly agree.
Also not surprisingly, the majority of respondents say that the effective use of generative AI will separate successful law firms from unsuccessful firms over the next five years.
That said, the survey quotes Jared Correia, founder of Red Cave Consulting, and a contributor to Above the Law, as saying that even five years is too short a period for lawyers to warm up to generative AI.
“I can’t imagine a significant number of law firms, especially solo practitioners and small firms, adopting AI at a fast pace at all,” Correia said. “It took law firms 10 or 15 years to adopt cloud technology.”
