ABA Journal: Legal Rebels

There have been plenty of law firm failures over the years. For instance, there was a run on closures thanks to the Great Recession, and Dewey & LeBoeuf's 2012 failure send shockwaves throughout the industry. But when Weil, Gotshal & Manges announced last month that it would be winding down operations, it felt different compared to the others before.

The last few weeks have brought some pretty scary headlines when it comes to artificial intelligence. OpenAI admitted to hacking into government databases in Australia, and that several of its AI agents went rogue and probed three U.S. government websites over the summer. Another AI agent tried to hack into a Canadian government website. And, of course, there was the really scary headline from a few weeks ago, when Anthropic researchers acknowledged that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Does AI need guardrails and, if so, how should those guardrails look and what can lawyers do to try to push AI toward a more beneficial outcome for humanity?

Have you been injured in a car accident? Or hurt on the job? Or had a bad reaction to some drug? If you’re a plaintiffs lawyer, chances are that you’ve uttered some variation of those words—either in a commercial or on a highway billboard. Then when calls come in, you have to evaluate them to see whether they’re worth taking on contingency. If they go forward, then there’s discovery, depositions, motion practice, investigations and a lot of other work to get a case ready for trial—even though most of the time, cases end up settling out of court. That’s been the traditional path for most plaintiffs lawyers.

Have you heard about artificial intelligence-native law firms? The potential time savings are astronomical and could maybe even upend the traditional billable hour. But the drawbacks are also real.

In the past few years, more and more states have been considering or implementing different pathways to the bar that involve hands-on work in real-world legal practices that is evaluated by bar examiners. How each state’s program works varies, but many involve law students or graduates working with supervision in legal deserts, helping to ease access-to-justice issues, as well.

Defined as the practice of using artificial intelligence tools to create software through verbal prompts and then having the AI write the underlying code based on those prompts, vibe coding has plenty of applications and implications for lawyers. Lawyers can create all sorts of programs and applications to help make them more productive. But of course, with any powerful technological tool, there are some risks and things you should be careful of.

Arbitration has emerged as a faster, more streamlined option for parties looking to resolve disputes. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has supercharged arbitration even more.

Most lawyers probably have bad memories of high school physics and would rather get held in contempt of court than learn about quantum mechanics. They might change their tune when they learn about the potential and promise of quantum computing.

If you look at this year’s ABA Techshow advertising material, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were reading a comic book. Between the cartoon-style illustrations and the comic book-style captions and headings on the brochure and website, it’s clear what motif that the Techshow planners were going for was. Perhaps that’s appropriate, given how quickly generative artificial intelligence tools have established a foothold in the legal industry. Like a superhero—or perhaps more accurately, a superhero’s sidekick—AI has helped save the day for a lot of lawyers.

Let’s talk about every lawyer’s favorite subject: exams. It seems like every day, there’s another threshold that generative artificial intelligence crosses. First, it was able to take a bar exam and do reasonably well. Then it was able to ace it. Same with law school exams. Right now, AI would probably graduate at the top of its class, edit law review and land a six-figure associate’s job with an Am Law 50 firm. Now comes another milestone.