“First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That line is from Shakespeare, of course, but it might as well have been spoken by ChatGPT, or perhaps the new Bing’s unhinged alter-ego Sydney, given the way OpenAI’s large language models are being rapidly incorporated into legal technology designed to make lawyers obso...well, the creators of the technology swear up and down that the point isn’t to eliminate lawyers but to make them “more efficient.” These legal language tools are one of the first examples of the kind of “copilot” technology that we are likely to see being rolled out across almost every profession in the coming months and years.
Last week, I spoke to two of the half-dozen or so legal tech startups and law firms seeking to use OpenAI’s large language models. One of the companies, Casetext, a San Francisco-based legal software company founded back in 2013, has just debuted a product it calls “CoCounsel” that uses OpenAI’s large language models to create a kind of legal search engine with a chatbot interface. Casetext says CoCounsel can perform seven key legal tasks, including searching a database, reviewing documents, summarizing those documents, reviewing contracts for compliance with a policy, extracting data from contracts, drafting a legal research memo, and helping lawyers prepare for a deposition, in part by suggesting questions to ask a witness.
The press release announcing CoCounsel came with some glowing endorsements from representatives of the law firms that had beta tested the product, including John Polson, the managing partner at Fisher Phillips, an Atlanta-headquartered law firm with offices all over the world and more than 500 lawyers. “The power of this tool to help our attorneys provide far more efficient legal research, document review, drafting, and summarizing, has already resulted in immediate, sustained benefits to our clients, and we have only scratched the surface of what it has to offer,” Polson was quoted as saying.
