Where does artificial intelligence leave the legal profession? - Robin Ghurbhurun

There are also a number of sector-specific AI tools, such as Co-Counsel Core from Thomson Reuters. This is an AI legal assistant (launched in the US in 2023) that equips its customers with eight generative AI-powered core legal skills, including Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarise a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline.

The legal profession stands at a pivotal moment, with generative AI poised to transform the landscape of legal work fundamentally. Law firms and legal professionals should embrace this shift, not as a distant future, but as an unfolding reality that demands engagement, exploration and adaptation. The greatest impact will be speeding up response times across the industry (especially when summarising large swathes of information), full adoption of dynamic contract management and automation capable of updating business intelligence and responding to changing risk factors.

For Paralegals, the deployment of AI tools, will likely lead to work involving more nuanced business-led advice rather than collation and administration of data, plus there will be a focus on quality control and the optimisation and safeguarding of contractual arrangements. There’s also an opening for Paralegals to up-skill and become expert legal ‘prompt writers’ (used for effective training and deployment of legal AI).

Prompt engineering is more than just a trend, it is a fundamental shift which is reshaping the way legal professionals interact with technology to enhance their work. Criticality, in law the stakes are high: a poorly constructed prompt could lead to misinterpretation or legal inaccuracy, whereas a well-designed prompt can provide accurate, reliable results that are critical to legal decision-making. Consider the example of an AI tool used for contract analysis. A well-designed prompt can help the tool not only identify key clauses and terms, but also understand their implications in different legal contexts. This capability transforms tasks such as contract review, due diligence and even legal research, saving countless hours while improving accuracy.

Legal prompt engineering is a multidisciplinary field that requires a deep understanding of both law and AI. Mastering the field requires not only familiarity with legal terminology and concepts, but also an understanding of how AI models process and respond to language. This dual expertise can be challenging, but it is essential to the development of effective legal AI tools – and there is certainly an opportunity for Paralegals here.

A human (paralegal) interface with AI will be essential for the foreseeable future particularly in areas such as identifying AI ‘hallucination’ of detail in responses and verifying outputs generated.

Robin Ghurbhurun sits on the governing board of the National Association of Licensed Paralegals (NALP) and is MD for further education and skills at Jisc.