B.C.’s legal profession is facing a new wave of artificial intelligence tools that could alter how lawyers research, draft contracts, manage cases and charge clients.

Claude, a set of large language models developed by American software firm Anthropic PBC, released its first legal plugin earlier this year, followed by a much larger set of tools last month.

It is essentially the persona of a lawyer boiled down into a feature set that users can add into their workflows.

“It really rattled the cages of the big players in the legal space,” said Kris Krüg, executive director of the nonprofit BC + AI Ecosystem.

It’s one example of how the legal profession faces big changes due to AI, which could have significant repercussions for the province’s 15,000 practising lawyers and their support staff.

The big-picture strategic thinking that lawyers do may retain its value, but the new tools are “very, very good” at tasks such as writing and reviewing contracts, Krüg said.

“It does have the potential to democratize some parts of the legal practice that we used to pay for,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean necessarily the lawyers are all going away, but it probably does mean that their industry is going to change quite a bit.”

The mix of billables is probably going to change, though the highest-value work that law firms provide to individuals and companies likely won’t be replaced, Krüg said.

The institution of lawyering has a really big wall around it due to education, articling and bar admission requirements, and there are psychological barriers to adoption, he said.

“If you are a lawyer who feels like this stuff is going to eat your lunch someday and then your IT department rolls out some new research and briefing creation tool or something like that, if you feel like that tool is coming for you, you might be pretty disinclined to be experimenting with it,” Krüg said.

AI represents more than just a new software package; weekly or monthly training, and onboarding into the new systems is necessary, he said. Organizations should commit to internal experimentation—a mix of evaluating new tools and training people on them, he said.

“In addition to experimenting and implementing the tools, they need to be working on the training and the cultural, human element as part of the whole thing,” he said.

B.C. legaltech firm Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.) offers a platform that uses AI to provide lawyers with the full context of a case, said Ed Walters, the company’s vice-president of legal innovation and strategy.

Its AI-powered Clio Work product centralizes everything that has happened in the case until now, all client communication, all billing information, every document generated and the latest case law showing how cases were won or lost.

“Lawyers would include all this context in the past, but they would have to maintain it in their own heads,” Walters said.

“They would have 29 tabs open with all the documents in the case and all of those emails in Outlook, they would use the research that they had conducted into case law and statutes, but they would maintain this context in their head, and often ineffectively.”

AI can be used as a “force multiplier” but human judgment is still essential, he said.

Discernment, moral decision-making and counselling makes great lawyering, so the idea is not that AI would replace that essential judgment role, but it will take a lot of the administrative work out of the lawyer’s day so they can help people more effectively, he said.

Professional regulators have AI on their radar, and while much focus has been on hallucinations by AI chatbots, Walters said the obligation has always existed to review the outputs of associates and computer-assisted research.

“That longstanding tradition of review of those outputs continues in equal force with generative AI,” he said.

“I’m not worried about law societies changing the rules so much. I think it’s actually very important that they apply those rules, the historic rules, to this context.”

Amid a regulatory overhaul, the Law Society of B.C. said it has issued guidance on professional responsibility and generative AI to help lawyers consider the use of generative AI tools in their practice. The guide is focused on the use of AI tools powered by large language models that can create new content or data based off of the data it was trained on, said spokeswoman Vinnie Yuen.

The society has also released a podcast on the topic, and has engaged external consultants to help it assess the opportunities and challenges that AI creates, including understanding how AI will affect the legal system, and adopt responsive regulatory processes, training and education, said Yuen.

Jon Festinger, lecturer with UBC’s Allard School of Law, said he has very little doubt that law societies around the world, which have already started addressing this issue, are going to get more sophisticated at rule-making in this area.

“Are we going to see some sort of seal of approval on certain kinds of legal AIs from companies that are marketing a particular legal AI product?” he said.

“Might law societies or others get in the business of certifying something as being at an appropriate level that it can be relied on to some extent, the way we rely on certain textbooks or other compendiums that legal publishers put together?”

Like in medicine, AI makes a lot more legal information available to the public, giving prospective clients a better understanding of their issues but also preconceived ideas about the right solutions, Festinger said.

“They might have asked ChatGPT to in effect be their lawyer,” he said.

The abundance of information could actually slow down the system rather than making it more efficient, he said. It could require more human intermediaries, possibly at more expense, to double-check everything.

At the same time, AI could allow lawyers to serve new clients at a less expensive price point, making law and law firms more accessible.

“Can you go down-brand?” he said.

AI could handle form-filing and entry-level tax work but is unlikely to replace human understanding around concepts like fairness and justice, Festinger said.

“AI can tell you roughly what the law is,” he said.

“But applying it and seeing the human nuances in a problem and in a case, I think that’s going to be within the purview of flesh-and-blood lawyers for a reasonable amount of time to come.”

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