The Most Practical Legal Training: Legal Agreements with AI

Among those professions most concerned about being replaced by AI are lawyers and legal experts. Among those most wanting to reduce legal fees are... well, almost everyone. Whether or not we will start to see a decrease in the number of jobs among our colleagues in the legal profession remains to be seen, but we won't be able able to simply drag and drop our legal agreements into your AI chatbot of choice, copy and paste, and have everyone start signing. For better or for worse, the legal system - like any other complex human-made system - needs to be understood in order to be reformed, which means that we need to understand how it works on a practical level.

Take any legal agreement, for example. Our aforementioned colleagues in the legal profession will provide us with recommendations, good ideas, and advice. But they won't understand your business the way you do - at least not in the completely individualized case that is your business. Yes, this means that we need to read and understand the legal agreements that we sign for any meaningful part of our business, and this is where the AI chatbots enter the stage.

The AI chatbots we've come to know and love will not thoroughly analyze and rewrite our legal agreements for us. Actually, they will - but that is the problem. The real issue with AI-driven productivity is the verification bottleneck that has been created for us humans. The hallucination-free AI tool is a myth at this stage of the game, and we so we need to verify as we go. And this is where AI becomes our best and most efficient training partner to help us understand legal agreements and the legal system like we never have before.

The way we can most effectively use AI as a legal tool (without subscribing to one of the many AI-driven legal services) is to train ourselves to understand more quickly - a private, personalized, indefatigable legal tutor (albeit, with mistakes - like the human ones). The AI models will help us summarize, analyze, and rewrite our legal agreements on the fly, but they will, more importantly, provide us with examples and tools to better understand them. The AI chatbots allow us to employ a process called scaffolding, which, rather than completely replacing us and saving us the trouble altogether, more quickly makes us legal experts in the domains or our businesses. They give us a starting point to understand the key pieces of legalese that are, nonetheless, important. They provide context and arguments, and help triangulate toward a better understand and, perhaps, a better-written legal document.

Can we say it in fewer words without losing its meaning? Ask the chatbot (and have your legal counsel confirm). Are we effectively defending ourselves against (insert the biggest risk you know in your business domain)? Ask the chatbot.

Giving us a starting point - even if it's not exactly right - is where AI excels. It can help us along and make us better at what we do. It will help us become better, more knowledgeable human beings if we recognize the opportunity to use it this way.