Last week, Stephen Embry wrote an article declaring that the old model of running into a senior partner at the water cooler and picking up their dropped gems about how to be a good lawyer is dead and gone. COVID took away the certainty that anyone was even working in the office. Office mandates and Biglaw real estate buying sprees are forcing people back in proximity with each other, but that doesn’t mean that the community is there. Rather than leaving the desk to get advice from senior attorneys, associates have been turning to the in-house LLMs firms have been providing to help streamline workflows. Recognizing that, among other things, heavy reliance on LLMs can reduce the trust associates have with their human colleagues, Embry encouraged partners to change how they approach training:
[W]e have to work to replace the informal water cooler with more formal and designed training that creates the opportunities for interaction between associates and between associates and partners. Structured training ensures that training will actually happen and that all will get the training, not just those who are lucky enough to be at the water cooler at the right time. We have to set aside the myopic focus on billable hours and commit to nonbillable time to create the training and the interactions that are needed.
That’s cool and all, but what if we just delegated that to AI?
Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease launched a new way for associates to work closely with their partners.* Reuters has coverage:
Vorys has developed “AI personas” of 19 of its partners, which can be embedded within generative AI tools to offer responses to questions and edit documents in the style of individual partners.
…
The personas essentially work as an AI chatbot that spits out replies and edits documents in the mindset of the partner. The digital personalities are developed from hours-long interviews about the attorney’s approach to practicing law, values and experiences. They aren’t trained on work product from the partners, but instead seek to embody their individual thinking styles.“It’s almost like having a low resolution map of the person’s brain,” said Nate Jedinak, Vorys’ senior director of software, data and innovation.
Ah, yes. The ol’ “I’ll phone it in with my clones while I’m doing the actual, important work” gambit:
For what it’s worth, both associates and partners have found the AI partner skins useful. One partner said that he was surprised that the AI’s responses to questions sounded a lot like him. Now all we need is for Stanford to run a double blind study to determine if the AI partners do a better job of teaching associates than their respective biological inspirations.
The innovation isn’t being sold as a replacement for partner expertise. But there is still room for it to be very useful. It will probably be more cost effective to run questions about smaller matters through the AI than to ask a several-thousand-an-hour partner what they think about things. And for bigger problems, the door will presumably still be open — any differences in opinion between the AI partner feedback and what the actual partner thinks about the issue could tease out nuances in reasoning that make for great learning opportunities.
As far as Biglaw AI adoption stories go, I’m interested in seeing how this pans out for the firm and firms that adopt the technology.
Lawyers, Meet Your AI ‘Twin’ [Reuters]
Earlier: Did Chat GPT Just Replace Law School Office Hours?
It’s Time To Say Goodbye To Water Cooler Training
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.
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