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ChatGPT-
ChatGPTis the Legal Sector ready?
ChatGPT is making waves in the legal sector and is recognised to have the potential to revolutionise the legal sector in various ways. Although it was temporarily banned in Italy recently due to some GDPR issues.
ChatGPT is an advanced language model AI trained by OpenAI, capable of processing huge amounts of data.
The question lawyers and others ask is - will AI replace lawyers in the legal field?
It is very unlikely that ChatGPT or other forms of AI will replace lawyers as we provide expertise, interpret complex information, empathy, creativity, intuition and human touch that an AI may not be able to replicate and we provide more than just legal advice to our clients.
Here are some advantages of AI in the legal sector: Law firms and various organisations already use AI in some form to assist lawyers in tasks such as:
1. Drafting simple legal documents such as NDAs, brief policies and procedures.
2. Conducting legal research.
3. Review bulky contracts to highlight important issues, spot errors, inconsistencies or omissions.
4. Generate summaries of legal documents and cases.
5. Carrying out due diligence especially in M&A and syndicated transactions where large documents in a data room need to be reviewed to find patterns and issues.
Concerns for AI in the legal sector:
As advanced and useful as ChatGPT is, its use raises the following concerns:
1. Bias - ChatGPT is trained on massive amounts of data, its responses to queries is only as reliable as the data it originally received.
2. Accountability and responsibility - the use of ChatGPT raises the issues of who should be held accountable and responsible where issues go wrong.
3. Misinformation - as a language model, ChatGPT generates its answers by stringing pieces of texts together based on its trained language model on billions of texts retrieved from the internet. It has generated grammatically correct answers that seemed plausible but were in fact wrong. An example was when ChatGPT was asked for information about Lord Denning’s arrest, it made up facts about Lord Denning being arrested for shoplifting which was indeed false.
4. Privacy - the use of ChatGPT raises privacy concerns, cybersecurity and GDPR issues.
For firms thinking of using ChatGPT, it is important to ensure that it is compliant with data protection regulations and the ethical concerns are also addressed as well.
