The Day Legaltech Finally Went Mainstream

Pardon the legal disruption (and welcome to the 100+ newcomers), but ChatGPT simply cannot be ignored, especially if you’re in legal.

I cannot remember the last time legal disruption was a national story. But consider when can you remember examples of the following all in such close proximity:

1. Casetext’s Jacob Heller shows up on CNN

2. Dan Katz’s and Michael Bommarito’s research is the subject of an Onion headline, hilarious btw.

3. The DoNotPay robot guy being super cringe and maybe a professional scam artist is being discussed on national news outlets.

Kathryn Tewson @KathrynTewson

Joshua Browder, CEO of @donotpay (the company that is scrambling in every available direction to keep me from investigating how genuine its claims of using AI are), has a history of trying to power-wash his image and gain a little clout.

The reason for all this attention is simple: the world saw ChatGPT and when they started thinking about who this could really impact their mind went straight to lawyers. Within the broadest tech circles, I’ve already seen multiple examples of influential experts who have identified legal as an area ripe for disruption:

1. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman uses legal as his primary example of how the base layer of AI will be fine tuned for specific industries

2. David Sacks and the guys from the All-In Podcast (one of the most popular podcasts on tech and business) discussing AI that automating work done by junior attorneys.

3. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (who talks as much tech/business as he does politics) recently predicted that 50% of work done by corporate lawyers would be automated.

I’m collecting a list, so if you’ve got other examples of influencers/talking heads (not #legaltech bubble folks like me) predicting the takeover of robot lawyer overlords, please send them my way.

I predicted in a webinar in early December that 2023 would be the year of AI. I gotta say, that prediction is looking pretty, pretty, pretty good. But now it’s February, so I’m going to double down: 2023 is also going to be the year of legal AI. Traditionally, when I would tell people that I have a legal technology consultancy, they would look at me funny and quizzically respond, “Legal technology is a thing?” Now, people outside my legaltech bubble are sending me headlines about robot lawyers. The lightbulb has gone on for everyone else.

He is my overly simplistic explanation for what other people are seeing: lawyers spend a lot of time reading documents, analyzing & issue spotting, doing research and then ultimately drafting new documents that respond to the first documents. ChatGPT, can read, analyze, research and draft documents and they charge a lot of money for their work. Now that people have experienced AI that can actually understand language, what felt like a remote possibility, all of a sudden feels imminent.

But wait a minute now Zach Abramowitz! The AI doesn’t really understand language — all it does is predict the next word. That’s why it doesn’t always provide accurate information and why it hallucinates imaginary case law. My question to you is what does it actually mean to undes

Pardon the legal disruption, have a great rest of your day, you deserve it.