Reuters: “What if you could get feedback from your firm’s best litigator at 2 a.m., without waking them up? Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease is trying to do just that. The 375-attorney Ohio firm has partnered with a Stanford Law School research lab to build “AI personas” of 19 of its partners, tools that can pressure-test legal arguments and redline documents in the style of a specific attorney. In Power of Attorney, columnist Sara Randazzo sees the AI personas in action and explains how the Stanford lab is working to upend legal practice…
Vorys is one of several law firms, including Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Davis Wright Tremaine, that are working as founding advisers with Stanford, as well as legal-industry focused AI companies Aderant and Harvey. Another one of the lab’s projects involves making simulations to help with associate training. Instead of waiting years to sit at an actual deal table or deposition, associates can use AI to help develop skills. Dechert piloted a deal simulator from the lab with its summer associates last year. Stanford officially launched liftlab in September to formalize work Ma — previously with CodeX, Stanford’s center for legal informatics — and law professor Julian Nyarko had been doing. Ma said she’s working primarily with Stanford engineering and STEM students, not law students, to develop technology to improve the practice of law. She said that as an academic lab, the goal is to create open-source research rather than monetize their work but that firms can choose to commercialize products beyond the research prototypes. Ma said she thinks law in the AI era will go through a “TurboTax moment” akin to what the accounting industry faced when the now-widely used software first came out. “It wasn’t like all the accountants were fleeing,” she said. Instead, it helped sharpen into focus when human expertise was needed instead of just the technology. “How we curate and assemble intelligence,” she said, “that’ll be the secret sauce and what persists.”…
