Page 26 - ACTL Journal Win24

Jake predicts that AI will soon be able to solve problems in math and science that have eluded humans throughout history. But that doesn’t mean that it is infallible.
Jake’s background is perfectly suited for being a lawyer. He was a high school debate champion, competing internationally and debating against the Oxford Debate Team. He went to Stanford Law School where he was the President of the Law Review. He clerked for Judge Boudin on the First Circuit and then went on to work in the White House Counsel’s Office and for Public Citizen and for Duvall Patrick before becoming an associate at Ropes & Gray.
But Jake also came from a background of entrepreneurship. And when he became a lawyer he realized that while it might be easy to find a vegetari- an-Thai restaurant that was open at 10:00 at night within a mile, it was re- ally hard to find a case that stood for a particular proposition. Jake decided to embark on an effort to try and solve that problem.
Casetext was developed to leverage AI technology to improve the practice of law. But after founding Casetext, Jake learned – you will be shocked to hear this – lawyers are sometimes resistant to change. Jake would call on potential customers and say, “I can change and revolutionize your practice.” And they would say, “I don’t want my practice to change.” But change is persistent and so is Jake.
A lot of lawyers are pretty happy with their law practices and are not looking for revolution. But revolution is coming anyway. And it is start- ing to seem a lot more sophisticated than filling in the blank. Casetext once took a bar exam that it had never seen before—something that we think requires some understanding of logic and reasoning. And it didn’t just pass –it scored in the top 90% of test takers. And that wasn’t just fill in the blanks – A, B, C, or D. That included essays, graded by humans.
The mental model he proposed for where we are with artificial intelligence today is to imagine the smartest student, the smartest person you’ve ever met, who has read every single book, website, transcript from every movie, fiction, non-fiction, in every language. So this is a very, very well-read, pret- ty smart person. With total recall. And you sit this uber-student down to take an exam where they get partial credit just for for answering so they’re going to answer everything.
And we all have heard the story of the lawyer who asked ChatGPT to draft a brief, and it did, including with case citations.1 It just turned out that the cases were not real. Jake likened this to a hallucination. But AI performs much better, and much more reliably, when it is given a discrete body of information and asked questions about it. At legal research, it functions like an excellent associate—or better. It can run twenty or thirty different searches against a database, pull out thousands of cases, read them all in full, summarize which ones are relevant and irrelevant, and sort them into different piles, synthesize the knowledge gained from reading those thou- sands of cases, and write a legal research memo responding to your original question – all in about two and a half minutes. CoCounsel, which was just
1 Readers of the Journal didn’t merely hear about it, they read Steve Schwarz’ article about it in our last issue – Fall 2023, p. 25.
introduced six months ago, processes about 10 billion words per day. And that’s equivalent of around 16,666 lawyers (more than the top five Am Law firms combined) if every one of those attorneys read all day long at 500 words per minute, twenty-four hours without sleeping.
So what does this mean for the profession? First, Jake posited that within five years, ev- ery lawyer will have an AI assistant perform- ing these kinds of tasks. And that will allow lawyers to spend much less time on routine tasks like legal research and drafting simple documents. Should we all be afraid for our livelihoods? Absolutely not. When the au- tomated teller was introduced, many people thought that bank tellers would lose their jobs. It turns out that there are more bank tellers now than ever, because the cost of opening a small branch has gone down so much.
The practice of law is a practice, and practice is both a noun and a verb. Jake encouraged us all to practice with this new technology. Del- egation will become a key 21st century skill. The better we can ask questions, the better the answers will be. And finally, while many of us may fear AI, and worry that it will rob us of the humanity we find in practicing law, Jake posited the opposite: that AI, by freeing up our time from the more mundane tasks, will allow us to spend more time on the things that are uniquely human, the interpersonal relationships, the creativity, and allow the best parts of the profession to flourish.
Daralyn Durie San Francisco, CA
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Fittingly, we would like to credit AI for creating the illustrations in this article.
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