Legal Tech And AI: Best Practices From Schoenherr's Banking & Finance Team

30 November 2022. Overnight, AI becomes a commodity accessible to everyone. Within a short period of time 152 million users had interacted with OpenAI's ChatGPT. By April 2023 this number had increased to 1.8 billion, making ChatGPT by far the fastest growing tech product in the last 20 years. When thinking about legal tech one tends to forget that AI has been part of document review and e-discovery products for more than four years now. Why did it not make an impact sooner and why all the hype around AI only now?

Previous generations of legal tech solutions were based on AI using machine learning (ML) technology and large language models (LLMs), which are vastly outperformed by the current capabilities. Moreover, the expectations for this technology were extremely high and often unrealistic. Users expected these solutions to replace entire review processes and thus the gap between expectations and capabilities was simply too high. Add the challenges of adopting new