Posted by Maria J. Gomez.
In a world where Artificial Intelligence is taking a big hit and influencing many fields, I don’t believe that many thought it would also take on the legal field. For some context, after the AI scared many by showing how easily it could come up with well acquired things within seconds, it scared the people, but most definitely the working force. Given that for the longest time we have lived in a society where one of the major potential conflicts is being overruled by artificially run robots. That being said, many thought that with the new implementation of AI the world would shift drastically from a workforce mostly led by humans, to a workforce that would simply be made up of technological machinery and AI. Although that has not happened as soon as people expected it to, it does not necessarily mean that it is still out of the picture. And now, seeing that it is possible for it to take over the legal field where it is mostly led by the “exercise of professional judgment and interpersonal engagement” it has been proven, as it is said in this article, that AI can do the same (Magdinier).
This article explains how there are four professional competencies for lawyers and any professional that can be narrowed down to. They are the following: knowledge being in the center core, judgment, content creation and persuasion. Looking at each one individually, knowledge covers the applicable laws and regulations, as well as the client’s business and their market and industry practice. After knowledge comes judgment, or the ability of a person to make the right decisions around things such as content look and feel, interpersonal and organizational dynamics and how to balance commercial and operational drivers. Later on comes content creation which are things like the writings made, graphic slideshows, spreadsheets with statistics, etc.. Lastly, comes persuasion. According to what Magdinier stated in the article, persuasion is and has “always been the lawyer’s superpower. Persuasion is the competency that executes with maximum effectiveness the delivery of all that knowledge, judgment, and content.”
Now, where does Artificial Intelligence come into play? And how exactly can a digital machine create arguments that carry such humane characteristics? At the current moment, AI excels at the performance of knowledge and content creation; however, it is expected that it will increase its performance on the rest of the competencies. The reason for this is because of how fast the datasets grow and the way that service providers and practitioners invest in the design and build of new use cases. If the situation keeps progressing the way it seems, soon enough AI systems will be able to” accumulate, organize, summarize, extract, and pattern-shift information…” that will “…augment how lawyers come to form their judgements and the tools available for persuasion” (Magdinier). Ultimately, the article ends on advice given to the younger upcoming lawyers. It claimed that those who are entering a world of AI-enabled lawyering, should consider thinking about the current limitations of generative AI tools and use that to their advantage. It ends it by saying that AI is not self-aware and it doesn’t exercise its own judgment. Therefore, it has no idea what a person intends to do with the outputs that a person gives them. Yet, its ability to inform a person’s judgment and enhance their persuasiveness will definitely transform the law field moving forward.
Maria is a student in the College of Arts and Sciences at Seton Hall University.
https://setonhall.instructure.com/courses/6067/discussion_topics/11406?module_item_id=78113