The Case for Generative AI in the Legal Field - Ep. 210
Dec 20, 2023
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Thomson Reuters is using generative AI to transform the legal industry by addressing information retrieval and content creation problems. Their AI-driven digital solution enables intelligent law searches and automates drafting and analyzing legal documents. The company prioritizes ethical concerns by providing AI development guidelines and participating in drafting ethical guidelines for the industry. Generative AI has the potential to increase access to justice and productivity for legal professionals, but there are still concerns regarding job replacement.
Thomson Reuters is using generative AI to transform the legal industry, addressing information retrieval problems and automating the drafting and analysis of legal documents.
Thomson Reuters is actively participating in the development of ethical guidelines for the use of AI in the legal field, prioritizing trust, safety, and adherence to privacy and data protection policies.
Deep dives
Thomson Reuters: Transformative Impact of Generative AI
Thomson Reuters, known globally for its news services, is also involved in the legal, tax, accounting, and fraud industries. Chief Product Officer David Wong highlights the importance of generative AI for the company's products, as they focus on solving information retrieval and written work production challenges. By incorporating generative AI, Thomson Reuters aims to enhance its legal research products like Westlaw and offer AI assistance for tasks such as drafting legal documents. The adoption of AI in the legal profession has been driven by lawyers themselves, who perceive it as a transformative trend that increases productivity. While concerns about safety, trust, and potential changes to the traditional billing models exist, the overall sentiment is that generative AI will bring positive changes to the legal profession.
Thomson Reuters' Plans for the Future of Work and Generative AI
Thomson Reuters has a roadmap for the next one to two years that includes introducing generative AI capabilities into their flagship research products and expanding their legal AI assistant, Co-Counsel, across their product offering. Their focus is on retrieval augmented generation, as their solutions heavily rely on retrieving information and synthesizing it into responses for legal questions. They are also actively participating in discussions around AI ethics and guidelines within the legal industry. By making generative AI tools available in all their products, Thomson Reuters aims to enhance productivity, increase efficiency, and potentially change the billing models in the legal profession.
Trust, Safety, and Ethics in Thomson Reuters' AI Development
Thomson Reuters prioritizes trust, safety, and ethics in their AI development. They adhere to AI and ethics principles, privacy policies, and data protection policies. They actively engage with legal and professional associations to stay aligned with evolving ethical guidelines and best practices. While there are still ongoing discussions regarding copyright disputes in training data and the intellectual property landscape for generative AI, Thomson Reuters takes a conservative approach, relying on pre-existing models, prompts, and segregating customer data to ensure legal compliance and foster trust in their AI solutions.
Thomson Reuters, the global content and technology company, is transforming the legal industry with generative AI.
In the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz spoke with Thomson Reuters’ Chief Product Officer David Wong about its potential — and implications.
Many of Thomson Reuters offerings for the legal industry either address an information retrieval problem or help generate written content.
It has a AI-driven digital solution that enables law practitioners to search laws and cases intelligently within different jurisdictions. It also provides AI-powered tools that are set to be integrated with commonly used products like Microsoft 365 to automate the time-consuming processes of drafting and analyzing legal documents.
These technologies increase the productivity of legal professionals, enabling them to focus their time on higher value work. According to Wong, ultimately these tools also have the potential to help deliver better access to justice.
To address ethical concerns, the company has created publicly available AI development guidelines, as well as privacy and data protection policies. And it’s participating in the drafting of ethical guidelines for the industries it serves.
There’s still a wide range of reactions surrounding AI use in the legal field, from optimism about its potential to fears of job replacement. But Wong underscored that no matter what the outlook, “it is very likely that professionals that use AI are going to replace professionals that don’t use AI.”
Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters aims to further integrate generative AI, as well as retrieval-augmented generation techniques into its flagship research products to help lawyers synthesize, read and respond to complicated technical and legal questions. Recently, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext, which developed the first AI legal assistant, CoCounsel. In 2024 Thomson Reuters is building on this with the launch of an AI assistant that will be the interface across Thomson Reuters products with GenAI capabilities, including those in other fields such as tax and accounting.
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