Where are things headed with AI in the coming year? What trends should legal IT professionals be aware of if they hope to obtain the best results with this technology? From whether it’s wise to continue dabbling with in-house AI experiments, to determining if “move fast and break things” is the best approach for something as complex as artificial intelligence, there’s much for legal IT professionals to pay attention to and be aware of in this ever-evolving environment.
Leaving Yesterday’s Benchmarks in the Dust
The first thing to be aware of is that the technology is advancing very quickly – and even as it becomes more powerful, it increasingly becomes more accessible to end users.
As trusted advisors to law firms around the globe, we're often asked about the latest trends in legal tech and how firms can make the most of new opportunities. In this guest article, we aim to help legal professionals stay ahead of the game by providing expert insights on emerging document and email technology trends in 2024.
Law firms are looking at legal matter resourcing and work allocation strategies in a new light. They’re adopting data-centric strategies to invest in their associates, creating a ripple effect that also fuels partner success and client satisfaction.
This win-win-win approach leverages the interconnectedness of associate career development, targeted partner support, and client satisfaction to secure your firm’s position in the increasingly competitive legal landscape.
Coming into 2023, who would have thought that generative AI will cause such a frenzy globally. After all, not only has AI been on the horizon for a long time, but it has already been in use, even though it might be invisible to us as end users. And perhaps therein lies the difference between AI and generative AI – the latter uses natural (i.e., human) language processing, making the technology supremely accessible to everyone. Hence, it’s popularity and the widespread embrace of ChatGPT.
The most successful law firms understand that knowledge is the sector’s most valuable asset. At Tiger Eye, we are truly passionate about legal knowledge management - the process of creating, documenting and using firm-wide knowledge and experience to accelerate workflows and ensure consistency of outputs. This is because we have worked with organisations around the world to boost productivity and drive greater value for clients through unlocking, capturing and centralising internal know-how, so we have experienced first-hand the powerful impact of effective knowledge management.
Recent years have seen significant advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT. These advancements, coupled with continuous improvements in data accessibility and computational resources, have markedly enhanced the capacity of LegalTech companies to automate complex text analysis. According to Goldman Sachs, Artificial Intelligence could replace as much as 40% of legal work.
The right legal knowledge management (KM) systems could help your firm to improve collaboration, reduce time spent searching for information, and provide legal expertise to clients both faster and more effectively. A truly comprehensive system can provide endless benefits to organisations looking to make the most of collective expertise by enabling the capture and centralisation of knowledge hidden within the minds of experts.
The law is a tough place to make it, particularly for young ‘hotshots’. Even in fictionalised versions of the profession, newly qualified legal talent always has a mentor or senior level support. For fans of Suits, every Mike Ross needs a Harvey Specter. The trouble is that the rates for senior and junior legal counsel are not always clear and don’t reflect the fact juniors rely heavily on their more experienced peers. In this piece, we will examine the relationship between the two rates and look at how technology might impact this going forward.
The legal industry is entering its automation era. This month, Lord Justice Birss shared that he had used ChatGPT to write part of a judgement - the first known use by a British judge. Earlier this year,
Allen & Overy introduced an AI chatbot to help draft contracts and a Thomson Reuters Institute survey found that 82% of the lawyers it surveyed said they believe ChatGPT and generative AI can be readily applied to legal work, with 51% saying it should be applied.
In a nutshell, ILTACON, the world's largest legaltech conference, marked its 43rd edition at Disneyworld Orlando. Organized by the International Legal Tech Association (ILTA), this event saw over 3,400 attendees, half of whom were ILTA members. Spread across different hotels, ILTACON featured parallel sessions catering to diverse backgrounds, two expansive exhibition halls spanning over 400,000 square feet, making it an undeniably massive affair.
As the support for Microsoft's Server 2012 and 2012 R2 reaches its end of life, Ian Bedford, general manager for Access Managed Services at Access Legal, discusses the challenges faced by law firms that delay the switch to alternative servers. He also explores how firms can leverage this change to optimise their IT infrastructure.
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