When Lawyers Say AI Can’t Bring Real Innovation to the Law, Maybe That’s a Good Sign It Will

As a practicing lawyer in the 90’s running AOL’s legal community on AOL, a community where lawyers helped people faced with legal challenges, and later started my own company to do the same, lawyers raised any number of reasons why this couldn’t be done.

Twenty years ago, lawyers told me blogs and digital publishing would never work in legal. You’d reach an audience outside your jurisdiction. Lawyers would never give information away for free. Lawyers would never publish insight without the use of a professional editor. And anything published by a lawyer online would never be viewed as credible.

Based on some of the comments to my LinkedIn post yesterday on Anthropic’s Claude and AI, in general, it’s feeling the same.

Rather than look at innovation and technology as an opportunity to improve the legal system and give businesses and consumers greater access, many lawyers look to the challenges and hurdles, almost appearing as if they want to hold onto the status quo.

Change is coming. In a comment from Asmita Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at Barbri Global,

”A profession known to be change resistant is now facing one seismic shift challenging the status quo. The numbers are already telling the story. Federal pro se civil filings jumped from 11% (steady for two decades) to nearly 17% in a single year, according to a recent MIT and USC study. That is roughly 41,000 filings, close to double the pre-AI average. Zoom in and it gets sharper. Pro se employment lawsuits up 49%. ADA up 40%. Fair Housing up 69%.”

I always thought the more people who told me it would never work, the more likely I would succeed. I am feeling the same way, today, working on the AI powered Library at LexBlog.

Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, says when you are doing something genuinely new, people will tell you “that will never work,” but that is not necessarily evidence that you’re wrong.

Maybe legal professionals’ questioning how AI is being used and developing in the law is a good sign for AI’s advancement in the law.

As to AI in the law, maybe more legal professionals questioning how AI is being used is a sign we’re headed in the right direction.

As a profession, we need to recognize the problem we have with the law. 79% of people see themselves as having no access to a lawyer. 79%.

Rather than look at why AI may not be appropriate for the law or used in in the law in ways you may challenge, it makes sense to look at AI as a means of bringing access to the law and legal information.