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After the release of GPT-4, the impressive latest version of OpenAI’s large language model, artificial intelligence surged to the forefront of the zeitgeist.
Professors worried that no human being would ever bother to write a term paper again. A handful of nerds went all in with the doomsaying and warned that AI has a pretty good chance of killing us all. Probably most presciently, workers, particularly those who write or code or otherwise do things that AI has already demonstrated itself to have some proficiency at, fretted about their future job security.
The legal industry has been far from immune. With ChatGPT now apparently able to pass the bar exam (with a better score than most aspiring human attorneys), I can’t help but wonder how far away we are from bona fide robolawyers.
I’m of the opinion that AI won’t be able to replace us for a while, even as it will be increasingly useful as a tool. However, since I’m just a simple country lawyer, I sat down for a chat with someone who actually knows what he’s talking about: Scott Stevenson, the co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, a legal software startup working on refining the first generative artificial intelligence contract-drafting tool.
“I paid for legal services at the first company I founded — money was spent very quickly on corporate and commercial legal work,” Scott told me. “Speeding up commercial transactions, M&A, those sorts of things, really seemed like something impactful we could work on.”
Scott was quick to emphasize that a traditional (i.e., human) lawyer will remain in the driver’s seat even though the software his company is developing is quite powerful. But while an experienced lawyer will have the final call on the language in any legal document, Spellbook’s product does have the potential to eliminate a lot of the late nights first- and second-year associates would otherwise spend staring helplessly at open Word documents.
“The focus is on contracts and commercial transactions work,” Scott said. “There are a lot of patterns AI can pick up in contracting. We started with document automation, and that product worked quite well. We got a lot of comments, though, from lawyers who said, ‘My work is too bespoke for that.’ Well, when large language models came around, they saw how AI could work to help get that level of customization they are looking for.”
Apparently Spellbook is catching on: the company is furiously working through a waitlist of nearly 60,000 customers. “Principle No. 1 when we built Spellbook is that lawyers shouldn’t have to change their existing workflow,” Scott said. “But we also have a human onboarding with every single lawyer who adopts this technology.”
The big money is paying attention too. Spellbook recently announced $10.9 million in new funding from several major venture capital firms, including one whose name will be familiar to anyone in the legal industry: Thomson Reuters Ventures. According to Scott, the new funding will be critical in scaling Spellbook’s customer success and onboarding team, as well as in making the product more accurate and easier to use.
As a litigator, I remain a bit of a skeptic that artificial intelligence is plotting a takeover of the entire legal industry. On the other hand, after speaking with Scott, I have a far better understanding of how these sorts of technologies can be put to use to make lawyers’ jobs easier.
Yet, that doesn’t make AI any less uncanny.
“The big question every lawyer asks is, ‘Why can I trust what is coming out of this? Where do these insights come from?’ There are trusted sources of truth out there that the technology will be drawing on, although I better not say anything more about that at this point.”
Color me intrigued. I suppose one has to leave a bit of proprietary mystery when talking to an ATL writer.
AI is already performing certain tasks at a high level. It is already displacing some human workers. Even so, at this point it doesn’t seem to me like AI is so different from any number of earlier transformative technologies — microchips, combustion engines, fire, take your pick. Human beings have always found new ways to use new things, often productively. Taking the tedium out of contract drafting, for instance, sure seems like a good thing to me. Lawyers could undoubtedly find better things to do with their time.
A big thanks to Scott Stevenson and to Spellbook for the insights.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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