The legal industry is experiencing a significant transformation due to technological advancements, just like many other industries. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a crucial role in automating document review, legal research, and repetitive tasks, thus increasing efficiency and accuracy in the legal sector. This development could lead to concerns about the future of legal job prospects for aspiring law students, but it’s important to understand that AI is not replacing legal interns altogether, but rather augmenting their roles and improving the overall efficiency of the legal profession.

Conducting legal research and reviewing documents is one of the most time-consuming tasks for legal interns. However, AI-powered tools can significantly streamline these processes by analyzing vast databases of legal documents and providing quick results. Legal research can be made more efficient by using algorithms that find relevant cases with higher accuracy and in less time. While AI cannot outright do the research for an individual, it does make the process faster and more efficient by allowing legal professionals to quickly scan and search large databases, including regulations, statutes, and more.1

AI can assist in document review, helping legal professionals identify key information, such as evidence and relevant clauses. This automation enables interns to concentrate on higher- level, more analytical work instead of manually reviewing a large number of documents such as contracts during due diligence. As with any other document-related challenges, AI can help legal professionals review documents more quickly.2 An AI-based due diligence solution can pull specific documents required for due diligence, like documents containing a specific clause, and spot variations or changes in documents.3The biggest advantage of AI is its ability to quickly review documents, thus saving legal professionals time and their clients money by reducing billable hours for due diligence.

With that, one of the most significant advantages of using AI in the workplace is the potential for cost savings.4 A recent survey by McKinsey showed that AI can reduce operational costs by up to 30%.5 By automating and streamlining repetitive tasks that would traditionally be given to a legal intern, AI can free up time and eliminate the need to hire an intern solely to do due diligence and research, but allows firms to hire legal interns for more creative and analytical work.6Using AI instead of a legal intern provides an unbiased perspective. Human biases are well-documented and over the years, society has started to wrestle with how much these biases bring harmful results.7 AI algorithms can learn to make decisions based on training data, but AI – unlike humans – disregards variables that do not accurately predict outcomes.8 This is the opposite of humans who may lie about or be oblivious to the factors that led them to make the decision they did.9 Developers code algorithms to replicate human decisions, which can result in biased outcomes.10AI helps identify and reduce the impact of human biases, but AI can also make the problem worse by deploying biases at scale in sensitive application areas.11 An example of this was found by ProPublica, an investigative news site, where they discovered a criminal justice algorithm in Broward County, Florida, that mislabeled Black defendants as “high risk” at nearly twice the rate it mislabeled white defendants.12 Training natural language processing models on news articles can lead AI to exhibit racial stereotypes.13 It’s impossible for AI to completely replace the human element in the legal profession. Human involvement is necessary for judgment, ethics, and strategic thinking.

The legal field is being transformed by AI, making it more efficient and accessible. Although AI can reduce the need for legal interns in some routine tasks, it is crucial to understand that AI cannot replace human intelligence and ethical considerations provided by legal professionals – which the industry needs. Legal interns are still essential to the legal profession, working together with AI to provide better results, improved efficiency, and more comprehensive legal services to firms and their clients. The future of the legal industry is one where technology and human expertise work in collaboration to achieve justice and fairness. 

References:

1 Clio, What is AI and How Can Law Firms Use it? 2023 Legal Trends Report https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/2023-report/read-online/

2 Id.

3 Id.

4 Daniel Calciano AI in the Workplace: The Future of Business Efficiency and Cost Savings, LinkedIn (February 22, 2023) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-workplace-future-business-efficiency-cost-savings- daniel-calciano/

5 James Manyika et al., Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages, McKinsey Global Institute (Nov. 28, 2017), https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs- lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages#

6 Calciano, supra note 4.

7 James Manyika, Jake Silberg & Brittany Presten, What Do We Do About the Biases in AI? Harv. Bus. Rev. (Oct. 25, 2019). https://hbr.org/2019/10/what-do-we-do-about-the-biases-in-ai

8 Id.

9 Id.

10 Id.

11 Id.

12 Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu & Lauren Kircher, Machine Bias, ProPublica (May 23, 2016), https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

13 Maniyaka et al., supra note 7.