FinTechTalk: AI in legal - unlocking efficiency and insight 

The impact of AI in the legal world 

The three main areas where lawyers already harness AI are reviewing, drafting and research. When they are tasked with writing a policy for a new regulation, they can use the precedents from the company repository that the AI can rely on to draft a new policy. In the next step, the new policy can be run against all the contracts in the database to identify all the issues and risks the company may be facing. AI can also be used to create a report on the findings that can be presented to managers. Regulation tracking software is another tool widely leveraged by legal professionals.

 

AI is a broad term incorporating LM and LLMs too. They fit different use cases, but if a company uses a multimodal architecture, the models will collaborate behind the scene to decide how to distribute the workload between them. Legal departments can get quick early wins by harnessing AI. For high-value use cases, however, more preparation and strategic thinking is required.  

 

AI is already transforming the areas of approvals, filings and regulatory submissions. There are solutions too that fill a template of empty cells with the unstructured data fed to them. 

 

Managing risks related to AI 

Adoption hinges on how the vendors can convince leading legal professional that that the AI tools can create value without presenting unmanageable high risk. Some companies are already creating AI compliance officer roles, who have insight into how these technologies work, as well as into the human aspects of adoption.  

 

To address the problem of hallucinations and “hallucitations”, companies can employ a dedicated team for linking citation to documents through links. This way, decades of corporate knowledge can be activated and leveraged by colleagues – a capability onboarding employees can greatly benefit from.   

 

There is also a shift taking place away from AI as a productivity tool to AI as a delivery tool, where legal experts can communicate and collaborate with each other and clients in an AI-native space.  

 

AI is democratising legal services by making it more accessible for fintech start-ups and individuals, which will to lead to basic legal services getting faster and cheaper. Cost savings, in turn, may have the knock-on effect that a smaller value dispute claim suddenly becomes worthwhile pursuing. As a result, lawyers will have to focus more on case acquisition and velocity. Legal firms that want to remain competitive must develop an AI strategy to ensure that they will be at the cutting edge of technological development in five years’ time and avoid any opportunity costs.  

 

The panel’s advice 

• Horizon scanning can help legal professionals keep up with a fast-changing regulatory environment. 
• Companies can save about 5 hours per week using AI tools for research and reviewing contracts, which can amount to millions of dollars in savings for global companies.  
• Explainability, traceability and auditability are key to Ai deployments in highly regulated industries.