Generative Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Risks to Law Firms

Chicago, IL, February 09, 2024 — The Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) released its most recent white paper on artificial intelligence and its impact on the legal industry. The paper, “Generative Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Risks to Law Firms,” provides readers with a fundamental, nontechnical, informative discussion of AI and generative AI (GEN-AI) concepts. It investigates the relationship between ethics and the rapidly (and sometimes unchecked) evolving world of GEN-AI, while also identifying this powerful technology’s benefits and risks as it relates to law firms.

“This paper explains how AI and Generative Ai can benefit law firms and outlines the issues that leaders in the legal industry should consider when using these technologies. In the near term, more firms will pursue ways to incorporate the use of AI to gain competitive advantage and efficiencies in reviewing and analyzing legal documents and to complete a number of otherwise time-intensive tasks,” says ALA President Geoffrey Williams, CLM, MBA, M.Div. “As this paper makes clear, AI is not meant to replace the human component; rather, it will decrease the overall time to get things done and help firms better serve their clients.”

The authors Albert J. Marcella Jr., PhD, CISA, SISM, President of Business Automation Consultants, LLC, and Gary Renz, JD, PhD, Adjunct Faculty for Engineering and Science Education, collected research in 2023 regarding artificial intelligence and GEN-AI in particular, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E.

The white paper also discusses the benefits, risks and ethical issues relevant to law firms using GEN-AI in their activities, including:

· Types of AI and GEN-AI.
· How GEN-AI collects and processes data to make informed decisions.

Readers will also delve into the various key activities and examples of current products and technology available to assist in conducting legal research, drafting litigation-related documents, searching for intellectual property rights and event drafting and analyzing contracts. It even has the ability to train legal administrative assistants. Discover the benefits and explore the ethical side of artificial intelligence in ALA’s new white paper.