“I can suggest alternative language for a contract clause to help clarify the meaning, but I can't provide advice on what language would be more favorable to you. That would constitute legal advice, which is something I can't provide. Always consult a legal professional for advice tailored to your specific circumstances”.

The paragraph above is ChatGPT-4's response to my question of whether its advanced generative AI could propose alternative language to make certain contract terms more favorable to one party over another.

Could ChatGPT and its variants propose such language a year or two from now? Quite likely. Did OpenAI place certain limiting parameters on ChatGPT to make it more palatable to the public while simultaneously minimizing the likelihood of regulatory scrutiny? Most definitely. Could I have plucked a particular provision from a contract and asked ChatGPT to rewrite it to state the opposite? Yes, I did - and it did. Still, that initial response perfectly encapsulates the limitations of ChatGPT and the plethora of legal software that incorporate it: the most innovative AI can synthesize large volumes of data, summarize lengthy legal text into plain English, find relevant statues and cases, draft legal text (including entire agreements) – all in an instant - but AI cannot provide true legal counsel.

The work of an attorney requires something uniquely human: to think abstractly, multi-dimensionally, and creatively to address the legal needs of their client. To provide legal counsel, a lawyer must explore the nuances of legal principles, arrive at novel applications for those principles, find and synthesize relevant facts, and advise clients based on the lawyer’s understanding of each client’s needs and circumstances.

To be effective, corporate counsel must have a deep understanding of company leadership personalities; financial pressures (be it from market forces or investors); the company risk profile and the reason therefor (two different companies facing identical legal circumstances may choose very different paths); business, marketing, and sales strategies; what the competition is doing and how the company compares - just to name a few. While ChatGPT can sift through such information and the various data points associated with it more quickly and more accurately than a human lawyer, AI cannot synthesize all that data in a predictive manner with the understanding of the gray areas created by the presence of human actors. Legal outcomes are not the cold result of a purely objective analysis of data, but the fusion of our best objective analyses with our understanding of the human element of complex legal situations.

It is without question, however, that ChatGPT can save a significant amount of time on the more clerical tasks, which, admittedly, may take away some law firm revenue as paralegals and associates spend less time plugging away at these clerical tasks.

ChatGPT and other legal AI software can create drafts of notices and contracts, locate and summarize cases in specific jurisdictions, and sift through a large number of documents to find critical provisions. More advanced AI software can provide rudimentary redlines of contractual provisions using language it obtained from clauses that were fed to the software. And while this software is in its infancy and riddled with mistakes (for example, there’s the story making the rounds that ChatGPT referenced a non-existent California ethics provision), AI-powered legal tools will undoubtedly continue to perform better as the technology advances and learns.

Attorneys will need to evolve their practices to leverage these AI capabilities, and in so leveraging, attorneys will also need to focus on their uniquely human capabilities: to know when to consult AI, how to assess AI responses and what AI is likely to have missed, and how to integrate the AI responses with the particularities of a client’s situation.

More importantly, the time-savings AI provides combined with AI’s limitations present a unique opportunity for lawyers to get back to their roots.

• Lawyers have an opportunity to create and build upon new practice areas and work on the “bleeding edge of law, business, and technology”. Lawyers are increasingly being asked about liability for autonomous vehicle accidents, drone regulations, complex cyber-security threats, cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and quantum computing. It’s no secret that law lags behind society’s advancements at large - perhaps this is an opportunity to get ahead.
• Lawyers must learn about new technologies – and become technology experts in addition to legal experts - to understand how the tech functions, which laws may apply to it and how, and what regulations may be needed to protect innovation, consumers, and the environment. Innovation is happening so quickly that our society can no longer “shoehorn entire industries into existing regulatory systems”.
• Lawyers need to understand changing social dynamics, like the types of legal issues families may face, particularly with respect to non-traditional family structures and advances in reproductive technologies.
• Lastly, lawyers can take the time to improve upon their existing skill sets and produce better outputs: further clarify contract language, conduct additional research to find that pivotal case, learn how other areas of law may interact with those in which they work.

There will always be demand for those attorneys that are able to provide better customized, customer-oriented, novel, and up-to-date guidance.

Finally, in all the predictions about the future of AI and the legal industry, something has been grossly under-appreciated. The legal field is a service field after all, and personal relationships matter. If a client must choose between ten different firms that all rely on the same AI systems, what is the real differentiator? In the midst of this AI-dentity crisis within the legal field, we need to remember the essence of legal work: the creative problem-solving, the novel application of laws, and the understanding of each client's unique needs. This requires a personal touch, a human mind, a lawyer's heart – things that AI, regardless of its sophistication, will never possess.