Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities said the company is currently negotiating a company wide license for ChatGPT:
“This branch of technology has real impact on our business…everything from helping our developers write better code to translating software between languages to analyze various types of information that we analyze in the ordinary course of our business. It will take an enormous amount of work that’s done today by people, and do it in a distinctly different, highly automated, efficient way.”
If one of the biggest hedge funds in the world is planning to use AI tools that can provide detailed answers to specific questions, law firms should consider following suit.
Here are a few ways law firms might consider using an AI tool like ChatGPT:
Quickly finding specific evidence.
In litigation, as lawyers review evidence, draft motions and prepare for depositions and testimony, (most) lawyers dump all those digital discovery files into an intranet database. To find a file, lawyers can search for file names, topics or dates. For example, if you wanted to know whether a client sent emails re: fraud in March 2023, the software that’s currently available lets you find this email in 2 primary ways. You can 1) review every single piece of evidence until you find what you need and 2) filter for document type and date while also searching for specific phrases (sample request: “all emails in March of 2023” or “emails that mention fraud” or even “emails from xyz person that mention fraud”). But a ChatGPT-like tool should let you ask a more direct question: “Did John Doe discuss fraud (or any similar term) in March 2023?”
Comparing language in contractual agreements.
When considering contractual provision, one of the most common questions from clients is “have you seen this provision before?” Right now, to answer that question, you’d have to either know, with certainty, that you have seen that provision before (and know where it came from) or have some poor sap sift through older agreements to find similar provisions and summarize how they were used. Manually performing Boolean searches for specific words and phrases within a firm’s (likely flawed) document management system takes FOREVER, and it’s not precise. The DMS my firm currently uses is great…but still is not perfect. For example, today I wanted to compare a new definition of “liquidity” to the same phrase in older credit agreements. To get close to that request…I searched our DMS for “liquidity” within files named “credit agreement” and had to manually open each document that looked promising. That’s not efficient. But an AI-tool should be more precise and could weed out bad results.
Case Research.
Case research currently relies on Boolean searching, too, but is a little bit better because of how the results are displayed. The two best case research databases (Westlaw and LexisNexis) show decent case previews: 3 or 5 lines of text relevant to your search, court name, jurisdiction, and the parties involved. But there’s still quite a bit of guesswork when reviewing search results. Lots of opening docs, scrolling, and reading for 20 min before you decide that that doc is unhelpful. Instead, if we could ask direct questions…I can only imagine the increases in efficiency.
Have you thought of any uses for AI tools in your work?