TL;DR:
- AI, particularly generative AI, is reshaping the legal landscape.
- ChatGPT, a cutting-edge technology, customizes narrative summaries from vast legal data.
- AI enhances deposition-related tasks like document summarization and background checks.
- Various AI-driven tools cater specifically to deposition practice.
- Traditional legal research giants also embrace AI to streamline preparation tasks.
- The partnership between Harvey.ai and Allen & Overy exemplifies AI’s growing role in the legal field.
- While AI won’t replace skilled litigators, it makes them more efficient and valuable.
- Ethical considerations surrounding AI in law practice are addressed in recent guidance.
- AI’s integration into the legal sector enhances efficiency and client value, but ethical considerations must be carefully managed to realize its full potential in the market.
Main AI News:
In today’s legal landscape, the pervasive influence of artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be overstated. AI has seamlessly integrated itself into various facets of legal applications, promising to transform the profession as we know it. Particularly noteworthy is the emergence of “generative artificial intelligence,” a technology capable of delving deep into vast digital repositories to extract invaluable insights, causing lawyers to reevaluate their chosen career paths. Notably, financial juggernaut Goldman Sachs predicts that AI could automate a staggering 44% of the tasks traditionally performed by attorneys – a statistic that looms ominously. Fortunately, the consensus among experts is that AI will augment rather than replace today’s legal practitioners.
While the current AI-enhanced legal tools in the market may not be explicitly designed for deposition-related tasks, it’s becoming increasingly apparent how AI can play a pivotal role in preparing for, conducting, and analyzing depositions within modern litigation practices.
Enter ChatGPT
This year, the legal community has been abuzz with the introduction of ChatGPT, a transformative AI technology that promises to revolutionize legal applications. Many of the novel legal tools hitting the market are built upon the foundation of OpenAI’s pioneering ChatGPT technology. ChatGPT is essentially a chatbot endowed with the ability to generate concise narrative summaries from copious volumes of data, encompassing court opinions, pleadings, contracts, and deposition transcripts. ChatGPT offers a high degree of customization, enabling users to dictate their responses in terms of style, language, format, and level of detail.
Customizing ChatGPT for Legal Applications
ChatGPT’s adaptability for legal applications rests on three primary pillars. First, it thrives on a steady diet of high-quality legal information. Second, it can be fine-tuned with law-related prompts to extract pertinent information tailored to the legal field. Third, robust data security measures – whether technological or contractual – can be implemented to safeguard client confidential data processed by ChatGPT.
In the hands of adept users, ChatGPT is capable of producing outputs that closely resemble the work of a human lawyer. Unlike its predecessors, ChatGPT, alongside other generative AI technologies, marks a significant advancement by extracting legal concepts and insights from datasets, transcending the limitations of mere character string matching inherent in conventional search technologies. This shift towards detecting and expressing similar principles in a human-like manner positions computers much closer to the domain of legal expertise.
The Application of AI to Depositions Artificial intelligence holds immense promise for a variety of common deposition-related tasks:
- Summarizing documents to emphasize critical issues.
- Distilling materials acquired during pretrial discovery.
- Crafting questioner’s outlines for deposition sessions.
- Researching local laws relevant to depositions.
- Conducting background checks on deposition witnesses.
- Conducting sentiment analyses on witnesses, based on written transcripts, audio recordings, or video footage.
This list is by no means exhaustive, as the inventive minds of modern litigators are bound to uncover additional applications for AI in deposition practice.
Promising Technologies for Deposition Practice
Several legal applications currently available to litigators claim to be tailored specifically for deposition practice. While we do not endorse any of these technologies, we mention them to provide insight into how technology may revolutionize deposition practice in the near future.
Casetext CoCounsel, for instance, offers to distill extensive document sets to their essential components, create deposition outlines, identify fruitful lines of inquiry, spot weaknesses in recovery theories, and provide summaries of pertinent local laws.
Everlaw Story Builder, a post-deposition case analysis tool, collates critical case documents and deposition testimony to construct timelines and compelling case narratives for use at trial.
Similar to Story Builder, DISCO Case Builder enables users to organize and extract insights from deposition testimony.
Sullivan & Cromwell, a global law firm headquartered in New York, is reportedly developing an AI Deposition Assistant that can formulate deposition questions and identify unusual witness behavior in real-time.
Apart from deposition-specific tools, several AI-enhanced offerings on the market can aid litigators in deposition preparation:
- Legalyze.ai generates summaries and timelines based on case documents.
- Humati.ai offers AI-enhanced document review and summarization.
- Leah CoPilot from ContractPodAi can summarize legal documents and uncover hidden connections.
Reveal AI equips litigators with pre-trained AI models for legal subject matter and sentiment analysis tools to discern the tone and intent of communications. It also provides detailed background checks on deposition witnesses.
Traditional legal research giants, Thomson Reuters (Westlaw Precision AI) and LexisNexis (Lexis+ AI), have introduced AI-enhanced products that, while not exclusively designed for depositions, hold significant potential to streamline common deposition preparation tasks. Unlike standard ChatGPT offerings, these platforms derive insights from extensive proprietary legal databases.
Furthermore, Harvey.ai, a ChatGPT adaptation customized for legal applications with an emphasis on data security, has forged a partnership with the international law firm Allen & Overy, where it is undergoing testing by over 3,500 lawyers.
While we have yet to reach the point where these technologies, no matter how impressive, can replace or replicate the services of skilled litigators, it is undeniable that an adept litigator armed with AI tools will be more efficient, valuable to clients, and potentially more compelling in court compared to a counterpart without technological support.
In fact, the decision to incorporate AI into legal practice may not be a choice at all. While the ethical duty of technology competence does not mandate technology use, it does require lawyers to possess knowledge of relevant technologies and engage with them. Lawyers should, at a minimum, evaluate whether technology can be appropriately applied to their cases and weigh the associated risks and benefits.
A comprehensive exploration of the ethical considerations arising from AI in law practice is provided in “Practical Guidance for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law,” published by the State Bar of California on November 16. This guidance addresses the multitude of ethical obligations within the lawyers’ professional code that are implicated by the use of generative AI technologies, including concerns related to over-reliance on AI outputs, client data security, client disclosure, and billing for AI technology expenditures during representation.
Conclusion:
The integration of AI, especially generative AI, is reshaping the legal landscape by streamlining various legal tasks, including deposition preparation. ChatGPT and other AI-driven tools offer customization and efficiency, making lawyers more effective. While these technologies won’t replace skilled litigators, they enhance their capabilities. The legal market must adapt to leverage AI’s potential for efficiency and improved client service.
