Over the last few columns, I have focused primarily on the regulation side of my work in artificial intelligence (AI) risk and regulation. That focus has reflected, in part, my concern about the current regulatory patchwork surrounding generative AI in Canada and the very real dangers of unregulated implementation of AI into our daily lives. That discussion will continue at a later date, but for the next few articles I plan to shift the focus to the research and perspectives on the risk management side of the equation.
The risks associated with AI implementation are not hypothetical. Many readers will be very familiar with issues such as hallucinations, bias, and overconfidence in generated results. These risks are already manifest across sectors and reflect only the leading edge of the AI risk landscape from my perspective. The coming risks of AI implementation will be acute, such as a physical injury caused by reliance on inaccurate medical output. They will be chronic, such as the slow erosion of professional judgment as routine tasks are increasingly handed over to automated systems. They will be individual, such as a client receiving incorrect legal advice based on flawed AI drafting. And they will be systemic, such as the embedding of discriminatory patterns into institutional decision-making.
The risks will also shape the future of our profession in a significant way and as I write this column during a brief summer vacation, I wanted to take a more relaxed approach to opening a discussion of which tasks and roles in a lawyer’s daily work may be most impacted in the coming years. This month’s post is lighter in tone and deliberately informal in method. It offers a discussion-oriented exercise: a simple mapping of Canadian legal practice areas against a recent Microsoft Research study that examined where generative AI is already being used successfully in the workplace. The results are open to interpretation and I may not even entirely agree with some of them but I found the process useful and thought-provoking, and I hope that you do as well.
Read the full report
AI’s Impact on the Legal Profession: Takeaways From Microsoft Research for Canadian Lawyers
