When will AI be The Future?

by An Trotter

Note: As is always the case, the views here are my own and most decidedly do not reflect the view of my employer or department.

In legal operations at the moment, many of us are asking each other how our departments are using Generative AI. 

HEARST Office of General Counsel (OGC) is partnering with our businesses to develop revenue streams around Generative AI. Case in point: The strategic content partnership announced today between Hearst and OpenAI that enriches OpenAI products with Hearst's over 20 magazine domestic brands and 40+ newspapers content. The deal ensures Hearst content in ChatGPT will feature appropriate citations and direct links, providing transparency and access to the original Hearst sources.  

At the same time, OGC is leveraging Generative AI, typically paired in some way with multimodal large language models (MLLM), in several areas of its own work:

  • Discovery: Including initiating the use of GenAI in the review process.
  • M&A Due Diligence: Categorizing documents, identifying potential issues, and tagging.
  • Document Storage: Automatically applying 150+ metadata fields for easier retrieval and specific example searches.
  • Research: Integrating with Thomson Reuters to enrich documents with metadata and suggest topics, streamlining the research process.
  • Presentations: Routinely using GenAI to draft portions.
  • Bots:
    1. Department: GenAI bots crawl internal repositories for quick results to plain language queries.
    1. Company: A GenAI-enhanced bot surfaces information from our client-facing SharePoint site.
  • Draft Emails: Using internal GenAI for editing routine correspondence for clarity and conciseness (including this response)

We've also tested AI for invoice and contract review, as well as drafting litigation-related documents. We aim to implement some of these solutions in Q1 2025.

Though helpful, these use cases feel not transformative but like productivity app plays, enabling a person to work their way through a higher workload more quickly.  In the short term these solution may help facile users achieve greater work-life balance. However, once the workplace dynamics adjust, I think the medium-term impact of what we have in hand is closer to what we observed in the rise of electronic discovery.

Electronic discovery exponentially increased the amount of data humans were expected to comb through, and created new specialized roles to help manage this line of work.  Earlier today I read an HBR article by Stephen Heitkamp and Sean West titled, "Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap — and Companies Need to Prepare that includes a compelling example on The US Treasury Department's request for comments on cryptocurrency disclosures.

I entered legal operations to be part of transforming the business of law for the 21st century.  To give context to my mindset, the illustration quite imperfectly captures what I had expected for the workplace over the past 40 years.  

In 2017 I was working at Harman when the company was purchased by Samsung. After I tried on a Samsung VR headset prototype, I was certain the shift to virtual workspace was finally imminent. I fully expected that within 2 jobs on my first day, a delivery service would drop off my corporate VR headset and I would work from a  lounge chair in my living room (C-suite executives would have nap-pod like lounge chairs to forego the headset strain).

Just as my doubts were re-surfacing, along came the COVID pandemic, and I was like “Okay – now here come the VR headsets.” As I type this during my lunch break on a keyboard attached via USB cord to a desktop in an office, I’m feeling less certain of transformational change in work mode, and in legal, stemming from pro-active vision. As Hurricane Milton is bearing down on the heels of Hurricane Helene I can't help fearing transformative change belatedly arriving as a reactive response to climate change, civil unrest and another pandemic (And no I'm not much fun when down). 

The US legal industry as a whole is extraordinarily resistant to shifting its model.  With a nearly unbroken record of AmLaw 100 profits in the 40% range  against S&P 500 returns 1985 to present of 5.7% per year on average (or the Global Fortune 500 7% profits on average in 2023, while the top 10 garnered 24%), there's not a lot of change incentive in private practice. And in the public service environment there's not enough investment. Exhibit A: Some courts still require faxes.

That said, when I worked at Paramount Global (back when it was still Viacom and CBS) the merest mention of unbundling’s potential to take hold was viewed as potential treason, because the existing revenue model was still great for business. However, in the past 10 years, Paramount B stock fell 90%  and in the past few weeks, post sale Paramount has laid off 15% of its workforce. In large part this happened because senior executive leadership resisted clear signals to shift the revenue model. As of this past Friday, Netflix's stock price is up nearly five-fold over the same period.

Some day many law firms will face a similar reorg.  My bet is most lawyers hope to postpone this reckoning until after their retirement. For my part, I'm looking forward to my VR headset virtual workplace job, augmented with a self-driving telepresence bot that can take an autonomous vehicle to the airport.

Image notes:

  • WALL-E is a Disney, not Paramount, product that came out 6 months after I started my first legal ops role. 
  • Incorporates a screenshot from Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, 1936.  
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