Industry Analysis

It’s just over a week since I arrived home from ILTACON, and only now do I feel prepared to post a write-up. After such a big conference, it always takes a while for the take-aways to percolate and distil down. So many things happen each day at ILTACON and each of them is so noteworthy that if any one of them occurred on a normal workday they would be the highlight of that day.

Although many companies have been using AI in legal in some form or other for years now, the advent of ChatGPT and large language models (LLM) that are powerful enough to understand and generate meaningful responses to complex questions represents a new era. There remain sceptics who don’t believe the technology is advanced enough to have a significant impact in the legal industry. These sceptics find it hard to imagine concrete use cases for the technology in legal practice. There are others who believe LLMs and advanced generative AI will radically change the industry in the space of just a few years. We have put together the most complete list we've yet seen of companies using GPT or LLMs for legal use cases, in order to shed light on what those use cases are in practice.

Almost half of all the lawyers in the United States will suffer depression during their careers. Of these, about 12% admit to having had suicidal thoughts. At a time when there are tools available that genuinely have the ability to improve the lifestyle of people already prone to mental illness, we should be including in our product requirements the question of whether a tool has the potential to restore balance and bring happiness.