Deploying Cutting-Edge Legal AI: Travers Smith's Cautious, But Open-source Approach. (TGIR Ep. 216)

5 snips

Aug 22, 2023

Guest

Oliver Bethel

Hosts interview Travers Smith's CTO, Director of Legal Tech, and AI Manager. They discuss Travers Smith's cautious approach to deploying cutting-edge legal AI, focusing on generative models, reasoning applications, and document analysis. Travers Smith open sourced their generative AI chatbot to promote responsible AI adoption. The team prioritizes model safety, minimizing subtle errors and hallucination risks. They foresee AI transforming tasks like contract review but not work product. Guests also discuss the challenges and future vision of AI in the legal field.

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Reflections on the Impact of Technology in the Legal Profession

01:48 • 8min

AI Manager: Managing Artificial Intelligence within the Firm

09:35 • 19min

Risks of Subtle Errors in AI-generated Common Law

28:49 • 6min

Resolving the Hallucination Problem

35:16 • 18min

Ownership of the Law and the Impact of AI Algorithms

53:21 • 2min

Future Vision for Developing and Testing the YCN Bot

55:51 • 4min

The Future of AI in the Legal Field

59:56 • 5min

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer interview three guests from UK law firm Travers Smith about their work on AI: Chief Technology Officer Oliver Bethel, Director of Legal Technology Sean Curran, and AI Manager Sam Lansley. They discuss Travers Smith's approach to testing and applying AI tools like generative models.

A key focus is finding ways to safely leverage AI while mitigating risks like copyright issues and hallucination. Travers Smith built an internal chatbot called YCNbot to experiment with generative AI through secure enterprise APIs. They are being cautious on the generative side but see more revolutionary impact from reasoning applications like analyzing documents.

Travers Smith has open sourced tools like YCNbot to spur responsible AI adoption. Collaboration with 273 Ventures helped build in multi-model support. The team is working on reducing dependence on manual prompting and increasing document analysis capabilities. They aim to be model-agnostic to hedge against reliance on a single vendor.

On model safety, Travers Smith emphasizes training data legitimacy, multi-model flexibility, and probing hallucination risks. They co-authored a paper on subtle errors in legal AI. Dedicated roles like prompt engineers are emerging to interface between law and technology. Travers Smith is exploring AI for tasks like contract review but not yet for work product.

When asked about the crystal ball for legal AI, the guests predicted the need for equitable distribution of benefits, growth in reasoning applications vs. generative ones, and movement toward more autonomous agents over manual prompting. Info providers may gain power over intermediaries applying their data.

This wide-ranging discussion provides an inside look at how one forward-thinking firm is advancing legal AI in a prudent and ethical manner. With an open source mindset, Travers Smith is exploring boundaries and sharing solutions to propel the responsible use of emerging technologies in law.

Links:

Listen on mobile platforms: ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ | ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
Threads: @glambertpod or @gebauerm66
Voicemail: 713-487-7821 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Transcript