
It has helped that I’m approaching AI from the same place as my colleagues: wanting to deliver excellent legal work and struggling to find the time to experiment with new ways of working with the tools. It is really powerful to show rather than tell – we’ve worked hard to present tangible examples of the difference AI can make in a form that really resonates with practising lawyers. Everyone wants to deliver better work and impress clients, so it is important to show how accessible the latest platforms have become. We don’t encounter a lot of resistance now, but we all need help staying ahead of a rapidly changing landscape. The best approach here is small experiments every day – it is only by testing what the technology can do that you understand its capabilities and limits.
This is obviously critical for us – clients come to our firm for quality of advice and the assurance that we’ll deliver. The first part of the answer is a human one – we remain individually responsible for the work we send to our clients and we have a comprehensive training programme that supports that. We’re also designing our workflows and increasingly our agentic systems in such a way that they require close cognitive engagement with the output. Secondly, quality output depends on giving the right context to the models, so having access to leading tools grounded in curated datasets has been critical. Finally, the tools themselves can contribute to a better outcome – automated checks of case references, agent flows that verify the work from different angles and guardrails around the sources used. Ultimately though, it all comes back to hiring and developing people at the top of their game for whom the technology is a tool and not a substitute.
Three years is a long time in AI! Humans still outperform AI on complex judgement and the ability to synthesise the vast amount of context and interpersonal dynamics that remain unavailable to the best models. As our lawyers will need to be able to manage agent systems from early in their careers, the quality of our skills training will be key. We also hold a valuable trove of precedents and data which we are leveraging to benefit our clients. Winning firms will bring a whole system to bear – the right tools, the right training, new roles and multidisciplinary teams – all underpinned by a mindset which accepts that exponential change is the new normal.
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