Generative AI in Law: A Comprehensive Guide to its Impact and Implications

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a new phenomenon that has swept the world this year. Generative AI is a sort of AI that can generate a wide range of objects, including images, written documents, and other media. Generative AI relies on models to produce new data based on the features of the data input. The data input for a Generative AI might be a specific dataset or instructions provided by the user, or it can be any publicly available information immediately retrieved from the vast repository of the World Wide Web. These AI models can learn continuously, refining themselves even further. Unlike regular or standard AI programmes, generative AI is not constrained by rules or programming. This enables them to be creative and produce new data miming human-created stuff.

The ability of a Generative AI to constantly learn, modify, and improve itself enables it to handle the demanding needs of legal work

Generative AI can be utilised for various activities, including legal research, due diligence, brief preparation, and summarization of large amounts of legal documentation. Generative AI can handle the tedious job in the legal industry, freeing up lawyers and advocates to focus on activities that require an innate human touch, such as context and comprehension.

However, just because a Generative AI can do something does not imply that it will consistently execute its tasks correctly. Generative AI can produce intelligent and logical answers to legal challenges based on information on the World Wide Web, but there is no guarantee that the responses will be permitted. Another concern with using Generative AI is determining the solution to a situation in which entirely contradicting information is presented on the World Wide Web. Similarly, the authenticity of the source relied on by Generative AI remains unanswered because, until the source of information is erroneous, Generative AI will be unable to provide a correct solution to the legal problem at hand.

The development of Generative AI has also brought issues about intellectual property and secrecy to the forefront

Intellectual property is simple to grasp but highly complicated to settle. When two people utilise Generative AI to tackle a comparable problem or question, they may come up with the same solution, which they can then use to create an intellectual work. However, who owns the intellectual property rights is still being determined, as using Generative AI makes it difficult to identify the work's original inventor.

The second difficulty with secrecy is that a lawyer's brief, strategy, and research should not be accessible or available to another lawyer or advocate. The Generative AI must ensure that a competing lawyer or advocate cannot access the information in its database. As a result, information compartmentalisation will be required, but this can impede the Generative AI's learning process and, ultimately, efficiency.

Conclusion

Generative AI cannot replace advocates. It is ultimately governed by logic. As a result, any solution to a legal dilemma it provides will be predicated on existing facts and logic, as it cannot account for the finding of further facts and evidence later. Generative AI can be a great tool in the hands of a skilled advocate, allowing a single advocate to compete against a team of advocates who do not use Generative AI. Generative AI, when correctly developed, has the potential to alter the legal business. It will not result in the displacement of advocates, but it will almost certainly cause advocates to be replaced by those who employ AI.