To become a lawyer, you need to think like a lawyer.
Turns out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a notable means to discover the cognitive wherewithal of how lawyers think. Law students are increasingly realizing that learning about AI during their law school endeavors can provide some especially handy benefits toward their aspirations of becoming a lawyer and also aid in jumpstarting their lawyering careers.
Here’s the deal.
AI is being devised to aid attorneys when performing legal tasks.
For example, the arduous burden of trying to scour through a massive corpus of eDiscovery documents can be made a lot easier and more on-target by using suitable AI capabilities. The AI looks beyond simply keywords and attempts to semantically assess the contents of the voluminous materials. As such, the aim entails the AI providing you with highly relevant selections that pertain to the particular legal matter at hand.
Another example consists of putting together a legal contract.
You provide the AI with a broad indication of what the contract is supposed to cover and voila, the AI will proffer suggested contractual narratives befitting the circumstances of concern. In addition, the AI can examine a proposed contract and highlight portions that seem out-of-sorts and ought to be legally recrafted. The more advanced versions of such AI will even make specific legal language recommendations for you to consider using in the finalized contract.
More and more, you can expect that AI will be a keystone in nearly all manner of legal work.
Digging Into The Articulation Of Legal Reasoning
One perspective on these uses of “legally-minded” AI is to merely leverage the AI for doing legal activities. Almost acting in a simpleton push-button fashion, you run a LegalTech app that has been infused with AI capabilities and the AI does the behind-the-scenes work for you. That is the user-oriented viewpoint of invoking AI that enacts some semblance of legal reasoning.
Law students can focus on just using the AI or they can take a closer look under the hood. By discovering how the AI is devised, you can learn quite a bit about what seemingly is going on in the noggins of human lawyers upon which the AI was initially modeled.
Creating AI that can do legal tasks entails making use of what we know or what we are still learning about regarding the cognitive underpinnings of lawyering. AI developers often attempt to reverse engineer the actions of seasoned lawyers to ferret out what the lawyer is doing and how they might be mentally performing legal reasoning. Experiments are performed whereby deeply experienced lawyers are asked to say aloud what they are thinking as they analyze a given legal case. By analyzing the verbalizations, it is hoped that the mental mechanizations of lawyering will be surfaced and can be codified into programming code.
All manner of legal reasoning techniques and technologies are being crafted based on the unearthing of how lawyers seem to think. Law students that learn about these techniques and technologies are bound to find that they can boost their own semblance of lawyer-like thinking processes. You gain a leg-up on how to construct legal arguments, how to unpack a legal case, and how to deal with especially thorny legal issues that you’ll confront once you are actively practicing law.
Knowing about AI & Law and the ongoing and advancing codification of legal reasoning can garner these benefits for law students:
- Aid your quality of legal mindedness by better understanding how lawyers think and boosting your capacity to perform lawyering tasks.
- Give yourself an added edge when it comes time for law firm recruitment and job searches by standing out as an adopter of the latest in AI-amplified computer-based LegalTech tools and knowing foundationally how they work (including both the upsides and downsides).
- Differentiate yourself from your peers that have almost undoubtedly not considered or explored the realm of AI & Law (expectations are that with the vast number of new AI-related laws being considered at the international, federal, state, and local levels, we are heading toward a significant uptake in the need for lawyers that are versed in AI & Law matters).
- Challenge your own assumptions about how legal reasoning works and perhaps even contribute to the growing theories and advances in solving grand puzzles of human cognition via the arena of thinking about the law.
- Provide yourself with a new and fast-track career avenue such as striving toward an entrepreneurial path rather than a traditional slogfest law firm job succession route, doing so by being readied to join LegalTech startups that are scurrying to embolden their computer tools with the latest in AI.
Lots of indubitably sensible and law-career-enhancing outcomes can easily be incurred by venturing into the intermixing of AI with the law.
Law students are usually innately inquisitive. The burgeoning field of AI & Law can provide plentiful nourishment to focus some of that law-seeking energy and inquisitiveness.
We are still in the nascent days of AI being devised and adapted to performing legal tasks. You can find yourself neatly and smartly on the ground floor as if it were a rising trend that is going to earnestly and quickly grow. Law firms are looking for ways to add AI to their repertoire of legal services.
Many law firms have found to their dismay that making headway has been stymied due to their existing partners and associates being overly busy learning about AI. Plus, they are at times mired in longstanding manually based staid approaches and not readily open to considering what AI has to offer. Law students have an opportunity to get into AI and bring AI savviness to law firms that are hopeful of finding new and improved ways to proffer legal services.
Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr., the legendary jurist, once said: “The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are going.”
There is no doubt that the law is heading toward AI, or maybe it can be said that AI is heading toward the law. Enterprising law students can look to the future and see that AI is on their horizon. You might want to be headed in that direction too.
About The Author
Dr. Lance Eliot is a globally recognized expert in AI & Law and serves as a Stanford Fellow at the Stanford Law School and Stanford Computer Science Department in affiliation with the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) where he was the Executive Director of a pioneering AI research lab. He has also been a top executive at a major Venture Capital firm and a worldwide tech executive at several large-sized companies. As a successful entrepreneur, he has started, run, and sold several high-tech startups. He serves on AI & Law committees for the World Economic Forum (WEF), ITU United Nations, IEEE, NIST, and other entities. Dr. Eliot writes a popular column on AI & Law+Ethics for Forbes that has amassed over 6.8+ million views. For more about AI & Law, see the top-rated popular book by Dr. Eliot entitled “AI And Legal Reasoning Essentials” which is available via Amazon and other online booksellers.
