‘Hard limit’ to AI use for lawyers – TCD professor
We are near to the ‘hard limit’ of the usefulness of AI for lawyers, the Law Society Psychological Services Well Within the Law festival at Blackhall Place has heard (3 September).
In a session on the future of the legal profession, legal academic Dr David Kenny (Trinity College Dublin) said that lawyers should be very sceptical about the uses of artificial intelligence.
“It’s currently an incredibly good marketing term, but an incredibly bad technology,” he commented.
“I would bet that large language models will not be terribly useful for the practice of law in the long term,” the TCD legal academic predicted.
Fad
Every technological fad would not necessarily be with us forever, and lawyers should remember what they were good at, he said.
Dr Kenny stressed the importance of teaching law students not simply foundational knowledge, but also critical thinking and adaptability.
“Law students need to learn how to think like lawyers, but also how to challenge and reshape legal structures,” he said.
High Court President Mr Justice David Barniville said that the judiciary could adapt very quickly to changes in technology and pointed to the recently adopted digital rules for courts.
“We need to be capable of adapting to very complex changes to legislation and reacting to what's happening internationally – geopolitically, climate change, all those areas. But technology, I think, is huge,” he said.
The recent Russian aircraft-leasing case heard in Dublin was an entirely paperless one, the High Court President pointed out, and the judiciary was very well disposed towards embracing useful new technology.
“We have quite a different judiciary now to 20 years ago,” he said, with 51 High Court judges and six more on the way.
“We've got a much younger judiciary now who are much more capable of the changes and the flexibility that will be required,” he said.
“With all my colleagues now, there is a totally different mindset; a mindset of being open to things, of listening, and of not just saying ‘we are the judges, we set ourselves apart from everybody else’.”
While judges must remain somewhat distant, they can also listen and learn and be capable of reacting quickly, the High Court President said.
'Ultimate board game’
Dr Kenny described the law as the ‘ultimate board game’ where knowing the rules gave lawyers unique insight into society.
However, while we were currently in a period of great change, legal practice had resembled legal practice for a very long time, he said.
“We use different methods, we go about things in different ways [but] there is a core of legal practice that might look similar if you look back 50 years, done in a totally different way but achieving similar outcomes,” he said.
Students could not be given static knowledge that would go out of date, he said, but must learn how to think like lawyers.
“Law is one of the things that binds us together as a society. Law is about solving problems peacefully, using force of persuasion, rather than force of a much worse kind.
“That is a deeply human thing, and we will always turn to lawyers to do that in our society.”
Law students must develop a critical mindset and always question what they were taught, he added, which added a necessary tension to the process.
Dr Kenny quoted distinguished US judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said: “we can live as richly in the law as anywhere else”.
“The law touches upon all parts of life and gives an insight into all sorts of different parts of the human condition,” Dr Kenny said.
Mr Justice Barniville said that the most critical trait for a lawyer to have was empathy, for both client and opponent.
Sniping
“The cases that are most enjoyable to try are those where the lawyers are not sniping at each other the whole time, so you can get to actually what the case is about, rather than dealing with them like children,” he said.
Most lawyers enjoyed their work, he commented, but it could take a toll.
Working with Law Society Psychological Services had been essential in helping judges deal with burnout over time, the High Court President said.
“Some judges spend their entire career on the bench doing very difficult cases,” he said.
However, if offered the chance to sit in a different area, they might not wish to change, he added.
Technology would not change the human factor in the law but would be an assistive device, Mr Justice Barniville said.
Dr Kenny added that TCD worked hard to help law students bond together as a group.
“That’s the start of a set of lifelong relationships; you develop more as you move out into work life and practice, and these are the people that you call on when things aren’t going well,” he commented.
It was essential to keep the professional community and legal hierarchy in as healthy a state as possible, Dr Kenny said.