4 minute read
ARTICLE
The Human Element: Preserving Empathy and Personal Connection in an Automated Legal World
Artificial Intelligence is transforming the legal industry. The legal market is in the midst of a customer-centric, cross-functional change journey, leveraging technology, skills, data, and metrics to evolve and create (and capture) new forms of value. However, as AI becomes more prevalent it is crucial for lawyers to maintain emotional intelligence to remain competitive.
In this article, I explore the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the legal industry and the importance of emotional intelligence for lawyers and legal professionals.
Legal technology is rapidly evolving as the needs of legal departments continue to grow and become more complex. There are generally four stages to implementing legal technology:
1. ‘Tracking legal work’ through software that enables monitoring, for example matter management, intake request, stages of litigation, and document management.
2. ‘Enabling legal work’ through contract lifestyle management tools, workflow tools, templates, expert systems and collaboration portals.
3. ‘Analysing the content of legal work’ through automated content tagging for intelligent searching, in-place records and e-discovery preservation, risk quantification, and self-generating knowledge management.
4. ‘Reducing legal work’ through systems that facilitate automation based on historical precedents, automatic risk scoring, data-driven document assembly, and machine-driven conceptual interpretation.
Using natural language processing and machine learning, artificial intelligence offers huge scope for lawyers and legal professionals to create new content more efficiently. Inevitably, there are hurdles to overcome, including the need for accurate data and the need to avoid biases, which could lead to unfair or incorrect outcomes, and ensuring AI-generated content meets the stringent compliance regime under which the legal profession operates.
With AI’s ever-increasing role in the provision of legal services, there is a risk of losing the empathy of human engagement and so, an even greater emphasis for lawyers to develop and maintain emotional intelligence. This ability to recognise and regulate one’s own emotions and to identify and respond to those of clients and third parties is likely to become even more relevant as AI-generated content increases. This emotional intelligence is especially important in clinical negligence and serious injury cases where we deal with life-changing injuries, such as amputation, catastrophic spinal injuries, brain injuries, birth injuries, and delayed cancer diagnoses. I often handle initial enquiries from clients or relatives where an accident has just happened with devastating, sometimes fatal consequences, where a parent has just lost a child, or a patient has learned of a delay diagnosing cancer and which is now terminal. These are individuals whose personal requirements vary hugely regardless of the legal issues involved. They need empathy, an adviser who can communicate clearly to explain how the law applies, but who can also consider the practical and emotional implications and who can tailor their approach to that individual in the midst of their trauma.
Academic studies can train legal professionals in the Law, but rarely the inter-personal skills needed to be an effective adviser in emotive cases. Such claims can also take a long time, with both the client and their legal team carrying the emotion throughout and as a lawyer, having to manage the vicarious trauma.
The need for emotional intelligence is not only reserved for practice areas dealing with highly personal circumstances. Corporate and financial transaction advice, for example, might not be perceived as emotive, but being able to read and respond to all clients at an individual level is crucial to managing their expectations and can still be a challenging and delicate balancing act.
Lawyers who possess strong emotional intelligence skills are likely to be better equipped to navigate and add value that complements the benefits that AI promises. These are skills that can be learned and developed over time and there is undoubtedly scope to incorporate more emotional intelligence training into professional training courses to help future lawyers build the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing legal market. Emotional intelligence builds better relationships with clients, colleagues, and opponents and in a sector where relationships are critical, those with emotional intelligence are better able to handle difficult conversations with clients, negotiate effectively, and build strong working relationships with colleagues, and in turn to build more successful businesses. ■
