We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Forget in house counsels, I am privy to live cases where clients (without any in house legal) have used Chat GPT to generate legal notices for claims. The notices seemed more meticulous and slicker than any which would have been drafted by a lawyer !
Why I feel AI or LLMs will never replace lawyers (maybe slightly reduce the need for so many, but that is still debatable in the Indian context where our economy is booming at an unprecedented rate, and when economy grows, lawyers grow) is that law as a profession is regulated and borne out of the need for subjective decision making, taking calls, and at the end of the day, someone to take the fall or someone to 'certify' certain aspects. In this regard, law really distinguishes itself from other pursuits such as engineering or management, where a lot of decision making is largely objective. Objective decision making is the first of decisions which will be replaced with AI/ LLMs. Even for law, completely objective or purely language based tasks, such as summaries or list of dates, or checking volumes of data for specific dates, or straightforward compliance requirements in bare acts will be easily replaced and are already being replaced with AI. But for things like structuring, which needs much higher order thinking, subjectivity in taking certain calls (such as, would a 49% subsidiary violate FOCC restrictions in combination with other factors), humans will continue be relevant. At the end of the day, it also largely depends on what us humans, collectively, are comfortable delegating to a machine. My personal belief is that law, with ramifications for violating it, will never be fully machine run or led. I mean sure, the in house counsels and A0s will churn out shitty drafts using AI, but hey, that doesn't change much for higher ups in the law firms.