The Conversation
Generative AI education for lawyers is coming from several directions at once. As they have in the past, many technology providers are offering the education necessary to get the most out of their tools and software. The difference this time, though, is that the users are readily taking them up on it.
“The folks building the technology a lot of times are the leading experts on early-stage technology. So it’s good for the marketplace and good for the industry for them to open up and tell what they know. Because they are living and breathing this stuff,” said Brad Blickstein, founder and principal of Blickstein Group and NewLaw Practice co-head at Baretz+Brunelle.
Legal professionals are viewing vendor-provided education as not only an opportunity to deepen their understanding of generative AI, but also as a chance to peek behind the curtain and see different providers’ approaches to large language models (LLMs).
“The more familiar you become with the concepts, the greater control you have over the vocabulary,” said James Sherer, co-lead of the Emerging Technology team of BakerHostetler’s Digital Assets and Data Management group and director of the firm’s Artificial Intelligence and Information Governance engagements. “The more you see, the more you engage, I think the easier it becomes to distinguish fact from fiction, marketing buzz from real world application, you can become a better connoisseur.”
Peter Geovanes, chief innovation and AI officer at McGuireWoods, considers these educational resources to be a “win-win” for lawyers and providers, because it adds to relationship-building in the generative AI space. “I think that’s why [providers are] so open to wanting to partner right now, because they want as many legal practitioners to get comfortable with this to understand it and then together, I think we can really push the envelope,” Geovanes said.
The education wave hasn’t only hit established legal professionals. Organizations and educational institutions have also started to recognize the need to educate future lawyers as well. For example, this summer, the innovation team at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe worked with legal education provider AltaClaro to develop a new learning module to train its summer associate class in the generative AI skill of prompt engineering, with plans to roll out the training to more Orrick professionals in the future.
“We’ve been very focused on generative AI [at Orrick], and we’re sort of in the active testing phase,” said Kate Orr, global head of practice innovation at Orrick. “We’re now understanding how generative AI works, what its limitations are, educating our lawyers and staff about those limitations and testing tools as they hit the market, so that we can also be ready and be comfortable with the technology and understand how it works when the market is mature and the tools are ready.”
The Orrick initiative has sparked interest at other top firms. “The interest is there,” said Abdi Shayesteh, CEO and founder of AltaClaro. “We were having calls every day around it.”
Indeed, just this month, eleven global law firms announced a generative AI training consortium with law firm training provider SkillBurst, which provides training modules that give legal professionals “the basics” on how to effectively use emerging generative AI tools. SkillBurst sees the initiative as a vendor-agnostic alternative for AI education.
“The legal tech vendors are instrumental; they’re the ones creating these tools that everyone is going to use, but they are not experts in learning content for lawyers and law firms,” Anusia Gillespie, chief strategy and growth officer at SkillBurst, said. “There needs to be a neutral third-party content that is delivered internally so the people feel it’s a firm initiative, not a specific product training.”
Meanwhile, law schools are also getting involved in the push for more generative AI education. Generative AI-powered contract drafting and negotiation platform Spellbook launched an AI Access Program to provide free AI education to law school faculty and students globally. This summer, Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which is Harvard’s research center focused on the study of cyberspace, announced the launch of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (IAIL).
In addition, in the spring, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and McCormick School of Engineering hosted the first installment of their new IMPACT Executive Education series with a session focused on how ChatGPT and generative AI could change legal services.
