Enter Harvey, today's golden child that lives at the intersection of technology and law. Harvey is an A.I. platform that can help lawyers perform legal tasks in areas such as due diligence, litigation, and compliance. Described as "the innovative artificial intelligence platform built on a version of Open AI's latest models enhanced for legal work," legaltech startup Harvey, the self-styled "generative A.I. for elite law firms," is about to play in the big leagues. Harvey is being rolled out for use by 3,500 lawyers in 43 offices of Allen & Overy, the seventh largest law firm in the world and part of London's "Magic Circle." I've watched legaltech evolve from the inside for decades.

Chatbots have been around since the 1960s and coders have been trying to pass the Turing test ever since, creating increasingly sophisticated iterations of natural language processing (NLP) software. A recent episode, where a Google engineer was sacked for claiming that the search engine's chatbot generator software known as LaMDA was sentient, perhaps demonstrates the leaps and bounds that NLP has made over the past few years. However, it's only with the public release of a new chatbot called ChatGPT that the potential of NLP has been taken seriously by the wider public. ChatGPT is a conversational piece of software released by OpenAI, designed to answer questions posed in natural language and even have a dialogue with users. It has been trained on a multitude of online data from Wikipedia to Reddit, although the information is only correct up until 2021. As well as answering general queries and therefore being a potential threat to Google, it also has the ability to write bespoke articles on any topic which is sparking off existential debates amongst academics and professional writers.

The ever-hastening progress of legal technology continues to push law firms to a future where lawyers can do more than ever before, in a manner so efficient that the value being offered to clients is beyond compare. Although practice management, document management, and even legal research platforms have incorporated artificial intelligence and machine learning into their offerings, not all law firms have gotten on board with the new capabilites that this technology has made available to them. Blue J Legal wants to help demystify the many ways lawyers can leverage AI and machine learning in their practices to improve results for clients. It's unlikely that machines will ever replace lawyers, but one thing is becoming clear: lawyers who use artificial intelligence will replace lawyers who don't. Sign up below to join "Exploring artificial intelligence and the law," an on-demand webinar hosted by Blue J Legal's COO, Avi Brudner.

In the future, self-driving cars may become the norm on roads rather than the subject of promising reports from the tech industry's leading companies. What first seemed impossible has now progressed into the realm of believability. A similar evolution is happening in the legal industry and, while the rate of change may seem slower in law than in tech, the legal industry isn't far behind. Not long ago, law firms were the go-to providers of legal advice. Today, alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) like Deloitte are competing for the same clients as law firms--and winning.

Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That's the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan's machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables. Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter.

It is a bit of a unknown. Perhaps if you rephrase it and say'what happens if we don't invest?' If you don't invest in technology you will fall behind and won't be able to compete and be at the back of the race. Clients could start to perceive this and could lead to some tricky conversations. A traditional ROI in AI, I don't think will give you a clear answer.

A business runs on diligence, passion, and creativity -- but it also needs a whole lot of legal help. Regardless of your industry, your startup needs legal assistance to ensure its growth remains safe and secure. You need lawyers to help you with incorporation and IP creation. You also need lawyers to help you write contracts for clients and staff. However, what you don't need is lawyers' prohibitive fees, which can cost your startup hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even millions -- in just the first few years.

Impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work have led some lawyers to worry that their profession may be Silicon Valley's next victim. But recent research and even the people working on the software meant to automate legal work say the adoption of A.I. in law firms will be a slow, task-by-task process. In other words, like it or not, a robot is not about to replace your lawyer. "There is this popular view that if you can automate one piece of the work, the rest of the job is toast," said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example. Yet other lawyers' tasks, like advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, seem beyond the reach of computerization, for a while.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly coming into its own in terms of use by the legal industry. We are on the cusp of a revolution in the legal profession led by the adoption of AI throughout the legal industry, but in particular by in-house lawyers. Much like how email changed the way we do business every day, AI will become ubiquitous -- an indispensable assistant to practically every lawyer. But what is the future of AI in the legal industry? A bigger question is whether AI will actually replace lawyers as seems to be implicated above (a scary thought if you are new to the profession vs. an old-timer like me).

There are three categories of intelligence in the legal vertical–intellectual, emotional, and artificial. Many lawyers have elevated IQ's, though relatively few seem to possess high EQ's– commonly called'people skills'. Only the best lawyers--trusted advisers– have both. Artificial intelligence (AI), a recent entrant in the legal vertical, scores high on IQ, but the jury is still out on whether machines can develop comparable EQ. What kind of intelligence is required for legal delivery?