Vectara

May 01 , 2024 by Nidal Zoghbi

In this post we will explore how Generative AI is transforming some areas of law by revolutionizing knowledge acquisition, providing answers to complex legal questions, summarising large documents, and helping legal experts become more efficient in e-discovery, research, and intelligence gathering. 

Since the release of ChatGPT, many law firms, small and large, have embraced Generative AI for efficiency and productivity to provide them a competitive advantage or for that extra assistance. It is widely accepted that Generative AI will redefine legal excellence. Given the industry has been grossly underserviced by tech innovation for decades, I encourage you to seize this generational opportunity and take action now.

Inspiring you to Act:

My objective is to educate, guide and inspire legal professionals to unlock the power of Generative AI in their firms, no matter the size, area of practice or stage of your career. Put simply, embracing innovation will do many things such as save you time, offer virtual assistance, and provide you with an enhanced level of intelligence. Allow me to also add: give you back some time, improve your lifestyle a little, we all know you need it!

In general, legal experts are amongst the most intelligent, detail-oriented, analytical, resilient and strategic thinkers in our society. I can imagine at every legal forum you’ll be hearing from an AI expert explaining how AI will automate some of your legal tasks, potentially replace admin staff, and go as far as replacing lawyers. “Don’t worry, that’s by 2030!” they’d chuckle. Quite comforting and perhaps insulting to the intelligence of lawyers and the profession if you ask me. Let’s face it, I’ve never heard of a doctor’s practice closing because of Google search. Same here, but if they insist, they should have ChatGPT represent them in court!

Let’s stick to reality and discuss the proven use cases we can show you today that can add value to day-to-day operations. For simplicity, I will use the term: Conversational AI for Legal Content.

Real & Proven Scenarios:

In the below scenarios, let’s just say you decide to hire me as an assistant. I have no legal background or experience. You ask me the questions and I just need to give you an instant accurate response. Naturally, I’ll be using Vectara’s generative AI platform.

Scenario 1: Give me 1000 pages of legal content in English or any other language(s). Ask me any questions and I will provide answers with top accuracy, explainability, and clear references such as which page and paragraph. Ask me as many questions as you like. Update the documents to another 500 pages and ask away in real-time. Put me under pressure, we have a business to run, deadlines, clients, board meetings, bills, court filings, cases to prepare, and a hearing on Wednesday… And Nidal, your SLA is weekdays, and weekends, I need you on 24 by 7 by 365.

Use Case Explained: Question and Answer (Q&A) application.
Q&A Apps are ideal for internal use or on a public website.

Scenario 2: Let’s pick up the challenge a little. Everyone is away today and we want Nidal to handle every single enquiry that comes from the public today.

The firm specializes in different legal areas: employment law, tax law, immigration law, and intellectual property law. Having said that, the public website is a reference library with excellent details about our customer engagement model, cost model, information about our lawyers and their expertise, 150+ blogs, and 20 excellent use cases with reference to legislation.

Customers can interact with me verbally or via a chatbot and I guarantee a response that is instant, relevant, accurate, and will be delivered with a customer service tone. My commitment to the managing partner is that we will have the best customer conversion rate ever seen!

Use Case Explained: Conversational AI using Chatbot for internal staff or for external customers.
The objective is to respond to customers with accuracy, establish trust and boost lead conversion rates.

Scenario 3: Choose the area of the law you desire, such as criminal law, civil law, family law, property law, etc. I am given access to the primary sources of law: NSW Acts, Regulations, Rules of Court, Common Law and Case Law… massive library. Now ask me questions and follow-up questions… I would be happy to respond in a legal tone, provide summarizations, top 10 bullet points, and a write-up you can use.

Use Case Explained: Have a conversation with the relevant sources. Ask and perform comprehensive research and e-discovery. This is the essence of conversational AI, providing answers with efficiency, accuracy, and speed.

Scenario 4: This one is exclusive for the entrepreneur lawyer who has an excellent business mind, is an innovator, and sees Generative AI as a competitive advantage. The entrepreneur lawyer approaches me and soon understands that the ingredient for success is his expertise coupled with information technology smarts who understand Generative AI can help build a legal tech offering that can be monetized or offered as a service: 

Use Case Explained: The flavor of Generative AI that is extremely smart with information and text – such as legal content – is called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Incorporate RAG-as-a-service into your data architecture and find the perfect way to monetize legal content such as: offering services to the public; educating legal students; offering other lawyers with e-discovery of exclusive legal content or providing free legal aid. 

The Business Case:

To start, my recommendation is to select a generative AI use case that is proven, provides high business value, low risk, and has excellent upside. Initially, select a small data set of legal documents to prove the concept. Upload into Vectara’s enterprise-ready secure platform and start asking questions instantly. Vectara uniquely provides you with a business-ready generative AI platform. Vectara is uniquely low on hallucinations, provides references to answers, and has a factual consistency score to measure the probability of being factually accurate. Vectara is one of the world’s most adopted retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with over 20,000 entities using it in its first year of GA.

Any change will take a bit of time to get used to, as we all did with mobile apps and Google search.
IT engineers can help optimize the output of the models to meet your desired requirements.

Conclusion:

ChatGPT has changed the way the world acquires knowledge, and, as such, Generative AI for business use has become widely opted over the last 12 months. Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the legal practice and is the most innovative change in the industry in 20 years. Vectara can easily help legal practices move from vision to action; from theory to practice and help enhance legal teams’ efficiency and productivity levels. The industry has started to see legal tech pick up its game to empower legal minds with cutting-edge technology never seen before. Take action now, we’ll help you.