Front Not a Robot Lawyer!

As the AI wars heat up, the obvious question for lawyers is: What’s in it for us? Plenty, according to Pablo Arredondo, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Casetext, a legal tech company focused on improving access to legal research. “As cool as it is that artificial intelligence can generate text, that’s not what will matter most to the practice of law in the coming months and years,” Arredondo told the ABA Journal. “It can read text and summarize it and annotate it and translate it, and it can categorize text and synthesize it and interpret it,” Arredondo said at a panel at ABA Techshow 2023. “These are the things that lawyers spend a lot of their time doing in various ways, and having AI that can assist you while you do that is critical.” To make that happen, Casetext has released CoCounsel, billed as the “first AI legal assistant.” Arredondo says that unlike language models that provide false information, Casetext’s tool reliably helps with legal research, contracts and other tasks. But whatever you do, don’t call CoCounsel a robot lawyer. “It doesn’t actually change anything about the lawyer’s ultimate responsibility or the work that they do for a client,” he says. “If it is used correctly, it can add a huge amount of value. This is a tool to help lawyers do what they do every day.”