It seems like the legal world has turned upside-down ever since Chat GPT 3 got officially released in November 2022. Leading law firms reacted promptly to stay on top of this wave of innovation. TILT already reported on Allen and Overy adopting AI powered tool Harvey. At the same time, legal tech companies started to attract investors for their AI powered projects. Robin AI and Henchman are among those that secured multi-million financing in the recent funding rounds.
New tech – new jobs
The purpose of the new technology is to reduce manual work and to get the job done more efficiently. This is usually interpreted as “more technology – less human labor”. However, the latest developments in the legal tech industry motivated law firms to expand their teams by hiring experts in AI, machine learning and data science. Thus, the new technology is requiring new people with a different set of skills.
DLA Piper
One of the fresh examples is the global giant DLA Piper. The firm announced that it has recently formed Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Practice. The practice will be led by Bennett Borden, a data scientist expert with considerable experience in the legal industry. This department in DLA will have two main purposes.
Firstly, it will advise the DLA clients on the adoption of AI powered tolls. DLA wants to be ahead of competition, by testing the AI systems that their clients have. This way the firm will be able to provide accurate and comprehensive advice regarding regulatory compliance that AI and algorithmic models require.
Secondly, DLA wants to build AI powered tools and gain benefits from the GPT3 model. Bennett’s team will help the firm to stay competitive with Allen and Overy and other leading players in the legal industry.
Mishcon de Reya
Along those lines, another giant is taking the same path, although at a lower scale. Mishcon de Reya LLP recently posted an ad for an AI engineer. The candidate will help the firm to better understand how to use GPT3. Mishcon de Reya stated that it has been working with the NLP models for the past two years, so it feels natural to stay on top of the latest developments concerning GPT3.
The ad for this post confirms that new job types may be emerging in law firms. Mischon de Reya is looking for a person who ideally has experience with the GPT3 and NLP models and ideally (wait for it) a law degree. The job is advertised as a GPT Legal Prompt Engineer, which means they need an engineer with a law degree.
How will others behave?
These are the two examples of trendsetters in the legal industry who decided to be bold and take the first step. However, many questions are popping up concerning the approach that firms may take in building their AI teams. The main one may be whether firms will be developing the AI teams internally, or have this job outsourced to data scientists and AI experts? A rough estimate is that a few of the biggest players would invest in building their own teams. This would essentially mean investing in startups and integrating them into law firm ops. The rest of the firms in the market (the vast majority) will probably be delegating tasks to outside experts.
Author: Vojislav Bajic