The Future of Law in the Age of AI: A Lawyer’s Perspective
In a compelling TEDx talk, a legal professional shares insights on how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the legal industry and beyond, while highlighting the irreplaceable human element in law practice.
The Algorithm on Trial
The speaker’s journey into AI began when a client stormed into his office demanding to „sue the algorithm” after being denied credit, presumably due to algorithmic bias. This case highlighted how AI systems, despite their sophistication, can perpetuate human biases through their training data. The successful resolution of this case – where the fintech company acknowledged and corrected the bias – demonstrates the importance of understanding and properly managing AI systems.
The Monkey Revolution in Law
Traditional legal work often involved countless hours of research, document drafting, and client communications. With AI assistants, lawyers can now:
- Draft legal briefs in seconds
- Generate contracts instantly
- Maintain personalized client communications
- Handle routine legal tasks efficiently
Beyond Legal Practice
The impact of AI extends far beyond the legal profession, affecting:
- Medical professionals (rapid diagnostics)
- Engineers (innovative design solutions)
- Software developers (automated coding)
- Corporate professionals (automated reporting and presentations)
- Manufacturing workers (advanced robotics)
The Human Element
Despite AI’s capabilities, the speaker emphasizes that human lawyers won’t become obsolete. The combination of human intuition, emotional intelligence, and legal expertise – paired with AI’s computational power – creates a more effective legal practice. As the speaker humorously notes, „human stupidity is limitless,” ensuring there will always be a need for human legal counsel.
Looking Forward
The talk concludes with a crucial message: the future isn’t about man versus machine, but rather man plus machine. While AI can handle complex tasks, humans still „choose the song and the rhythm.” The key lies in responsible AI development, understanding its limitations, and maintaining ethical oversight.
The speaker advocates for educated engagement with AI technology rather than fear or rejection, highlighting the European Union’s efforts to regulate AI development and implementation.
This TEDx talk offers valuable insights for legal professionals, technology enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the future of AI in professional services.
Keywords: AI in law, legal technology, artificial intelligence, algorithmic bias, future of legal practice, TEDx talk, professional services automation, human-AI collaboration
00:00:07 you know I did the artificial intelligence attend the tedex conference because it wanted to download new ideas so the idea of AI is that every everybody thinks it knows what it is it’s something you have in your pocket or on your computer you know mostly how it works I want to tell you you know nothing about it artificial intelligence is stored somewhere everywhere actually in high power Computing clusters where it works based on Magic Tech magic they don’t really actually understand how it works because
00:00:45 it has surpassed the idea of programmers and just software you can adjust its temperature you can make it hallucinate you can ask it to dream about dreams people have never dreamed about and it can create anything from the recipe for a Napal bomb to the next novel that will win a prize but I’m not trying to teach you about the technology behind AI because I’m no coder I’m actually to tell you about how AI is going to rewrite our future so the idea was one year and a half ago when I started researching
00:01:25 artificial intelligence I noticed that things were changing and people were changing so one day I had a client barging to my office and shouting very angrily red-faced I want to sue I want to sue the algorithm all right all right I said calm down who’s the defendant I don’t know I don’t care the algorithm okay where should we send the summons the chitat to a server in Silicon Valley perhaps I don’t care I want Justice I have been discriminated so at that moment I understood two things one that law
00:02:11 school hadn’t prepared me for this and two that the future came barging in my office wearing a wrinkled suit and demanding he wanted justice so I did what any good lawyer does I asked for a higher fee and started researching so the idea of Limitless evokes a world without boundaries so what does it truly mean to be Limitless in the age of AI so can you imagine your Tony Stark from the Marvel Comics or movies you know he has Jervis the flying AI suit but instead of the iron suit you have an AI tool an AI assistant in your
00:02:54 pocket that can do complex mathematical physical engineering problems in mere seconds it can pick your outfit for the day I know my wife does this every day it can also predict Trends and it can help you make investments on the stock market it can also find out that Miga and stala recipe your grandma used to make that what it’s that’s what it means to be truly Li Limitless in the age of AI so I would like to do a little experiment with you who here has used an AI tool like chat GPT gemini or Siri put
00:03:37 your hand up okay a lot of hands good good and uh from all out of view have you used these AI tools to let’s say write a love text to the significant other or maybe do your work or write your curriculum V again hands up okay first of all good for you secondly how did it work did you get a second date did you do well in your job I guess you did wonderful so when talking about AI I’m talking about the monkey revolution in everything especially in law I used to spend hours upon hours researching papers looking up articles
00:04:28 reading laws writing emails to to judges receiving emails from my clients and answering them standing in line to pay taxes and all tedious uh anything that makes you kill yourself actually for waiting in line for uh stuff like that and then a AI came now with my AI assistant I can write pages of briefs I can do anything my intern used to do in just second I had spent 12 years of school and high school four years of college two years of internship two years in uh Superior uh school and then I was no different from a scribe
00:05:17 from ancient Egypt oh I I’ve seen my life flashing before my eyes it’s okay thank you the other way around so I talked to you about the algorithm about using the AI tools and the monkey revolution in law so now my superpowered intern doesn’t ask for coffee breaks doesn’t ask for pizza and doesn’t complain it’s a Monday morning time feed creativity Amplified so what to do with all this time Limitless client relationships you know I never had the time to stay and talk to my client but guess what even the emails I write to my
00:06:07 clients are based on what AI creates for me it can read all the hundreds of emails I had in the past with that client and refine my answers and it answers as if it was me with my own grammatical errors with my own tone of speech it can seem it is me contract drafting you know we’re famous ask lawyers for writing contracts you just ask it for the contract and in by Magic again in mere seconds you have the contract and then you can refine it with the nuance and strategy you desire the AI job Revolution doesn’t
00:06:48 concern only lawyers you know when I presented my speech to the organizer they said you should talk about other professions too so why not and I thought about medical doctors you know AI can diagnose patients faster than you can say hypochondriac it’s like having your your own doctor house in your pocket without the Vicodin addiction Engineers AI is building bridges that are also beautiful not just sturdy it’s like having your own Leonardo DaVinci coders coders are are the first to go there are already
00:07:32 losing jobs AI is coding faster than you can say stack Overflow and it doesn’t ask for energy drinks corporate jobs who here has a corporate job okay good for you guess what AI is crunching numbers writing reports and making PowerPoint presentations faster and beautiful more beautiful than you can imagine and they don’t put people to sleep with their presentations and last but not least AI is is also replacing Factory workers because robots are building cars faster than Elon Musk can sell them I’m sorry I’m little bit nervous
00:08:22 The Curious Case of AI so let’s get back to my client shall we the problem actually was he wanted to SU Bank credit evaluation system algorithm now that’s a mouthful a fintech application denied him a credit he just clicked on a button and the application said you’re denied to receive the credit he thought and he was right that he was discriminated against based on his name his ethnicity and his skin color that happens in Romania trust me so before suing the algorithm we analyzed it and noticed
00:09:03 that it had unintended bias in the data sets used to train the model so everybody here has heard about CH gbt you know it has three billion parameters those three billion parameters have bias in them because guess what humans are biased and AI is trained on human data and because of that bias that algorithm decided to I my client the credit after analyzing the algorithm and getting back to the fintech company explaining them what went wrong and so on they said you’re right our algorithm had that
00:09:43 problem that error we changed it he received the desired credit and everybody was happy the moral of the story is not to Sue technology or not to be against it but to educate yourselves and better understand it oh the other way around again future the future comes with a lot of challenges we wouldn’t like a matrix or Terminator type scenario wouldn’t we you know the idea in Matrix or in Terminator that the machines take over and use uh us for batteries or even worse desire to kill us well AI isn’t far from that we have
00:10:32 to create AI ethically and responsibly we have laws here in the European Union and all over the world what uh laws are being created to say what AI can and it cannot do uh AI cannot be used against you in a court of law yet but you should think of AI as the super intelligent kid the nerd that sat in the back of the class we need to instill or better yet install moral values in it which are universally recognizable should the AI be developed by a totalitarian state like China let’s say for example it
00:11:15 might have the wrong view or Russia it might have the wrong view about the other uh parts of the planet that’s why when thinking about AI you have to be educated and know how to work with it last but not least I would like to do another experiment with you before my conclusion this time I want you to think about the most useless skill you have I mean the most useless something out of the ordinary not necessarily extraordinary and I’ll give you T 10 seconds to think about it so give me a countdown of 10
00:12:08 seconds again it’s counting down but it forgot to so 10 seconds completed okay cancel again proof that AI isn’t human proof did you talk about your most useless skill on the count of three I would like for you to shout it out your most useless skill ready one two three okay the idea was that your most Lo useless skill is what makes the difference between humans and AI AI cannot have emotions AI cannot actually attend a Ted conference those usess skills will be what make the difference between Ai and
00:13:13 humans in the future when when we all we have lost our jobs and we’ll have to ask to our AR overlords bad joke okay in conclusion it’s not a question of man versus machine it’s a question of man plus machine you know AI can do the complex steps in a dance but we still choose the song and the Rhythm so if you ask me truly if I am worried that AI will take my job as a lawyer no never you know why because there is another thing that is Limitless human stupidity and there will always be a need for a human lawyer and for that I
00:14:02 thank you for listening to me have a limitless day [Music]