Jack Shepherd

AI won’t just speed up the legal system — it will revolutionise it Artificial intelligence is going to help citizens to assert their legal rights, and the opportunity for lawyers will be in creating this new way of working

This kind of meaningless hype is just as damaging as being a legal tech luddite, in my view www.thetimes.com/uk/law/artic...

Thanks for the callout. The fact that AI is not 100% accurate may actually serve as a feature, not a bug, as it forces people to engage with the primary materials and check things. Indeed, I wonder whether we'll see over the next year the process shift from "AI creates" to "AI checks"

When was the last time a useful feature was introduced in Word or an actual problem was fixed?

I’m less impressed by Apple Intelligence than I would be a design change that stops fluff getting into the charge port

Agreed. Like a sense checker not a creator

Too much about gen AI assuming the use case is to create content eg “first draft”. There are so many use cases. It upsets me when eg courts base guidance for use of gen AI on the assumption its only use is to create eg. first drafts of a brief. This is probably not where most of its value will lie

SPEED READ: Agentic AI is very cool and impressive. It's going to intimidate people that value control, e.g. LAWYERS. But you can build products around that. I worry about people jumping straight to agentic AI instead of fixing underlying bad processes. Beware of people replacing our brains.

AI agents are exciting but not a silver bullet Two years have gone by since ChatGPT captivated the world. Upon its initial release, everyone was amazed by its seemingly magical ability…

Why is everyone trying to replace our brains? medium.com/@jackwshephe...

Generative AI in the legal industry: is accuracy everything? Accuracy might not matter as much as you think it does…

Accuracy is important in gen AI for legal, but I don't think it's as important as most people think it is medium.com/p/60c6f3a15947

Should I start posting on here? Tried 2 years ago but nobody else seemed to be on here...

Been grappling with the question of whether having AI write a first draft for you erodes the legwork you do in thinking...and whether the blank page problem even exists for lawyers that much. My thoughts here jackwshepherd.medium.com/lawyers-how-...

“AI is a load of garbage”

Is not the same as

“What are the key use cases for AI”

A picture of the emoji for a person raising their hand

Anyone else in legal/legaltech just go to @heyitsalexsu.bsky.social ‘s followers to find folks?

Tracking down my colleagues and friends in the legal and legaltech industry. Please repost this if you're in the space.

Most are still at the stage of tinkering with AI and understanding it. I’m a bit confused on what law firms are investigating AI rather than sorting out their data. I’d probably leave building the profits to tech companies

Link is broken! Aside from law firms spinning up chatgpt clones and buying co counsel/harvey I’m not seeing a lot of embedding these tools. For example, I have not yet spoken to a lawyer who has used a generative AI tool in a big law firm and I speak to lots of them every week

The AI wave of 2023 has shown two key differences to innovation: (1) serendipitous (play around and see what works) and (2) directed (understand the tench and what people do, marry them together). Or both. Most are doing just (1)

It’s disappointing to see people claiming to be sick and tired of “LLM doubters” or naysayers. It’s perhaps even more disappointing to feel like some people think you are an LLM doubter when actually you just want to make sure efforts are directed to where they deliver the most value

Knowledge management. I hope I have demonstrated that capturing knowledge is not as simple as just making one person’s work product visible to another. The context needs capturing, the quality needs vetting, the information needs sorting. Some of this can be done by a machine, some of it cannot.

Manual processes. I list a number of manual processes in this article that lawyers simply don’t do as well as a machine. Some of these are candidates for generative AI (e.g. checking whether a document makes sense); some are not (e.g. contract automation)

Collaboration. The ability to semantically compare two documents will help clients and lawyers get up to speed more quickly with e.g. what the other side has suggested in negotiations

Negotiations. Rather than have humans cross-refer to playbooks or ask lots of questions while reviewing contracts, some tools are already automatically aligning a contract with pre-defined playbooks, using generative AI.

Setting up templates. I still think a template is nearly always a better starting point than asking an LLM to spin you up a first draft. However, I think AI can be used to get you up and running with a template quicker. After that point though, I think generative AI falls out of the picture

What are the specific use cases for generative AI in contract drafting? Instead of asking “what generative AI can do for contracts”, I ask “what needs to be done for contracts, and can generative AI fix it”

Here’s a probably too long piece on where AI can apply to contract drafting. Too often I hear oversimplification of use cases and I want to get into the nitty gritty jackwshepherd.medium.com/what-are-the...