Creativity and judgement key to lawyering with artificial intelligence

Good judgement and skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity and wisdom will become even more important to lawyering as the use of artificial intelligence increases, says UNSW Professor of Law Michael Legg. The director of the Law Society of NSW Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession (FLIP) stream at UNSW Law discussed what an AI-enhanced lawyer looks like at the Law Society's FLIP Conference in Sydney this month. "Whatever the nature of their practice, it has been said that the most important skill of lawyering is sound judgement," Professor Legg said. "Sound judgement is about more than answering legal questions – it encapsulates the relational and contextual elements of being a'problem-solving' lawyer. "None of the AI technologies currently available have the capacity to completely replace lawyers, as each still requires the exercise of human judgement as part of the process." The talk was part of a collaboration on research between UNSW Law and the NSW Law Society, which is responding to issues such as legal technology and new ways of working raised by the NSW Law Society's FLIP report in 2016. The report recognised that the legal profession is undergoing change at a pace never before experienced and in unforeseen ways, which has major ramifications for the legal profession, clients and society, particularly in relation to access to justice. FLIP Stream Research Fellow Dr Felicity Bell showed research by Israel-based contract review platform LawGeex, which compared the efforts of 20 "experienced" lawyers in reviewing five different non-disclosure agreements, with those of its software. The lawyers took, on average, 92 minutes to review all five contracts, while the software took a mere 26 seconds. "The software outperformed the lawyers in terms of accuracy, and vastly outperformed them in terms of speed," she said. "The lawyers took, on average, 92 minutes to review all five contracts, while the software took a mere 26 seconds.