Already a subscriber?An artificial intelligence tool that law firm MinterEllison has built based on a GPT-4 platform can whip up a basic piece of legal advice in 15 minutes – a task that would take a graduate lawyer up to eight hours.For Minters chief executive Virginia Briggs, it’s a chance to liberate young lawyers from the dull grind of freshman legal work. But it means the firm has to train its grads in new skills, and recruit in new ways.
Minters has been working on its Advice Generator tool with some of its clients for up to a year. Ms Briggs said it was now possible to rely on the AI advice, and it was straightforward for humans to check it.“This is not quite the correct description, but effectively it footnotes the advice so that the verification is easy to do,” she said.
They were tasked to come up with a new idea or product using AI by the end of their internship. “Some of the use-cases they came up with were fantastic. You’re just taking bright minds, and you’re applying them and using them in a different way.”This could ultimately feed back into the kind of clerks and graduates Minters selects – “we’re certainly looking to universities, they’re going to have to supplement the way they train” – and also into the skills that the firm itself imparts.
“As governments do all the time, they come up with a new form of legislation, and you won’t be able to go into AI and apply that. You’d have to apply your reasoned judgment.”based on the data it can crunch, this is not the same as being genuinely innovative or creative in its legal reasoning. “We have people who’ve got those skills. We don’t want to become the next Microsoft, but it is interesting to see if we can create tools that will be market competitive,” Ms Briggs said.