Dive Brief:

• Nearly two-thirds of legal professionals (63%) desire increased expertise about generative AI before they are willing to implement it in their workflows, according to a recent survey.
• This need for expert guidance stems from the fact that only 10% of corporate department and law firm professionals said their team is “very trained” on GenAI, the global legal technology and enterprise legal services company Consilio said in a press release.
• Roughly one in three legal professionals also expressed hesitation that generative AI will work accurately given the potential for so-called hallucinations in which false information is produced by the technology, the Consilio survey found.

Dive Insight:

More than one in three legal professionals highlighted a lack of experience on their legal teams about properly leveraging generative AI as a major hesitation keeping them from using the emerging technology. 

Slightly more than one in four said lacking the right tech talent to support implementation was another concern, and 20% said they were waiting for wider industry adoption before they would follow suit.

At the same time, 28% of legal professionals said they are educating their legal teams and business colleagues about the emerging technology’s efficacy and benefits, according to Consilio.

But 58% of the surveyed professionals expressed concerns about data security if they were to use GenAI and 30% said they worried about putting their company’s intellectual property at risk.

“It’s clear from our survey that legal departments and law firms are looking for ways to safely utilize GenAI,” said Andy Macdonald, Consilio’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “However, without the right people as a guide, confidence it will actually work, strong data protections, and integration with your enterprise data, the risks of GenAI can easily outweigh the benefits.”

Both legal departments and law firm professionals also expressed optimism about the potential benefits of emerging AI.

For example, 48% of professionals said GenAI could free up talent for more strategic work and 32% said it could help reduce overall business costs.

As for specific use cases, 54% of legal professionals expressed interest in using generative AI to gain better insights from data.

Roughly half of the surveyed professionals said they were interested in using GenAI to review more documents and leverage existing work products for greater efficiency. Three in ten legal professionals expressed interest in implementing generative AI to manage contracts. 

“Data security and control are the lynchpins of responsibly utilizing GenAI in a corporate setting; without them the results can’t be trusted,” said Raj Chandrasekar, Consilio’s chief technology and innovation officer, in a prepared statement. “However, once the right fundamentals and guardrails are in place, the technology has seemingly endless potential applications, to drive efficiencies, process more data, and reduce overall business costs, making the technology the most impactful evolution of our sector since Technology Assisted Review.”

Consilio conducted its survey of 129 legal professionals from corporate law departments, law firms and government-affiliated entities in late January at the Legalweek New York 2024 conference.