AI in Legal Recruiting Insights

👀 Fascinating insights about legal AI from my friend Ate A Pi on Twitter, who spoke with an big firm partner about AI. See her tweet below. I agree with *most* of it. My take - the future is AI-enabled super-lawyers, and putting the AI in-house. It'll be here FAST. More on what I've seen doing legal AI, especially since founding GC AI six months ago this week! 🏡 In-house is the best place for legal AI. We are relatively cheaper and don't bill by the hour. We are more operational. Oh and psst - we hire and fire firms. CEOs think of their lawyer as the GC and their team. Now, there are some outside counsel with deep relationships over time. But the days of the outside guy or gal every CEO wants are ... not the norm anymore. Law firms have to do RFPs like any other vendor. 📈 In-house lawyers have grown 7.5x times the rate of other kinds of lawyers the last 25 years. The role of "product counsel" boomed, just like the role of product manager in this time. Today, Google employs 828 "product counsel" per a search I just did here on LinkedIn. That's more than only the biggest law firms.  AI accelerates that trend. Just like lawyers with more context about your business are more useful, so too is AI. Companies will want to own that and have their best judgment lawyers on it.  So what about the tech? Who's winning? 🏆 OpenAI's GPT-4 is the only model good enough for legal work, and it's not even close. I say this having taught 1000s of lawyers how to use AI. But ChatGPT and vanilla tools have been instructed to be too friendly and tuned to be chatty and golden retriever-esque.  🤡 Gemini is nerfed. It refuses most legal questions.  ❌ Claude's tone is weird, and it won't search the web. 💄 Meta's Llama misses the point entirely, often. It thinks Revlon duties from the famous corporate law case - are to put on make-up.  🍫 PS the bar exam is legit hard! It tests grinding, speed, and memorization. It's a good proxy for many legal tasks. GPT-4 earns my respect for passing it.  But ... I disagree the legal profession is decimated. The future I see is: 🦸🏻♀️ Empowered super-lawyers, like the 100X AI-enabled software engineers Amjad Masad talks about and we see with AI for software. 🤝 Insider and niche knowledge will keep rates for certain expertise high. Sometimes you want the lawyer who's been before this judge or worked for the relevant regulator. You want to read the room, to weigh factors, to know what other of their clients are doing. AI can't do that yet. 🏀 Legal AI will raise the bar for the entire profession. Like how basketball play got better when everyone started lifting weights. You have to use AI if your opponent does. ⚖️ People who could never afford lawyers or just didn't hire them - will get basic but good legal advice. Think - represented divorces, lawyers on smaller deals, startups in regulated industries. AI will lawyer the unlawyered. Thoughts? #LegalAI

I've made a point recently in my speeches and columns that a lot of the impact of AI on the legal sector will come from the moves of big tech companies, not just #legaltech vendors. This may seem obvious but is often missed, as the legaltech community is pretty inward looking. I sometimes get pushback that legal is too small and slow-moving to be of interest to the big players. One of the best places to see evidence for this is in job postings. Alphabet's X team, focused on "inventing and launching 'moonshot' technologies that...could someday make the world a radically better place" is currently hiring a "lead for one of our early stage projects focused on applied Large Language Models & generative AI to the legal space." Legal, it seems, is worthy of a moonshot after all. Remember that big tech companies can often give away for free functionality that comprises the entire business model of many startups. Would your strategy change if you knew you'd be competing with Big Tech?

🤖 The battle between #Employmentlaw + #AI is just getting started. 👩🔧 Employment lawyers are watching a recent case taking place on Planet #California, where a job candidate has alleged Workday's AI-based recruiting tool disproportionately screens out members of certain protected classes. That is, it causes unlawful disparate impact under Title VII. The legal theories are interesting, but that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is Workday's position on #liability: if the robot #discriminates, that's on the end user, i.e., the employer, not the robot's creator. AI is the new hotness. The #law takes it sweet time catching up with new #technology. If you're using AI in your #HR ops (and you most likely are), you might not be able to play the "it wasn't me it was the robot" defense. At least not in Workday's opinion. While this plays out, and even thereafter, #employers should understand where they're using AI in the #workplace and #audit that AI for bias. Also employers should have policies and SOPs for AI use that vet and govern use before implementation. What gets measured gets managed. Better to identify #risk and prepare, rather than wait and see how this law here shakes out. 🕷 Call your friendly neighborhood 𝐡u𝐦a𝐧 employment lawyer as needed. 🕸