As AI continues to disrupt industries across the globe, many professions are left wondering how their roles will be impacted or even replaced by this burgeoning technology. In the legal industry, paralegals are particularly interested when they hear that AI is capable of tasks such as reviewing, sorting, summarizing, and indexing the records. And while many news articles would have you believe that AI is poised to take over, the truth is that this technology is still in its infancy. AI certainly has the capability to improve many roles and increase efficiency, but it’s far from dominating the workforce.
AI is fantastic for repetitive, tedious tasks. In the legal field, it can help summarize lengthy records and documents, be trained to look for key words or to pull specific information, build timelines and cross compare data from across multiple sources. But AI struggles with nuance and when a task requires variability or additional context, which is all too critical when learning the facts of a case. This is where paralegals will remain vital, as they supply the human touch and understanding when reviewing information related to each case.
Furthermore, it will probably take the legal industry time to fully trust AI and transition to using AI tools, just as it was delayed in transferring from paper records to electronic records. However, the mistrust of AI technology is not completely unfounded. Again, AI is still in its infancy and it’s certainly going through growing pains. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and other large language models are still training and learning on data sets. But sometimes their efforts result in “hallucinations.” AI hallucinations are “outputs that are not based on training data, are incorrectly decoded by the transformer or do not follow any identifiable pattern.” In other words, AI may misinterpret data by seeing patterns or trends that don’t exist and give nonsensical responses as a result.
Additionally, there are many ethical and legal issues with AI technology that have yet to be settled. For example, what if the data an AI is training with is inherently biased? AI does not have the ability to understand what bias is and put it into context with its responses. On the legal side, there are many concerns surrounding intellectual property, copyrights and liability. Who owns the content that AI generates? If an AI-based decision maker creates a scenario that causes harm, who is liable? The regulatory guidelines to minimize these concerns simply do not exist at this time.
Instead of replacing paralegals, AI is a tool for helping paralegals manage their heavy workloads. By eliminating the manual labor associated with repetitive tasks, paralegals will have more time to review case-related information and assist on more cases overall. Paralegals can step in where AI cannot, using their insights and emotional intelligence to help build cases.
As teams come to trust AI technology more, they can deliver better results for clients while achieving greater efficiency and satisfaction within their own roles. So instead of imagining AI as a domineering force that’s here to replace paralegals, think of it as an assistant, here to help relieve the burden of repetitive work.