It's never too early to start getting a jump on the problems of 20 years from now. Or 10 years from now. Or even possibly even five, with technology growing at the rate it does.

This uncertainty is one of the reasons that moderator Adam Kuhn wanted to make some changes to this year's "Why Lawyers Are Adopting AI Faster Than You" panel at Legalweek, which will be held from 10:30-11:30 a.m. on Wednesday at the New York Hilton Midtown.

Panelists David Lapresi of Philips Lytle, data scientist Alexis Mitchell from Opus 2 International, and Andrea D'Ambra of Norton Rose Fulbright will confront some of the major challenges that data poses to the practice of law—mainly that there's eventually going to be too much of it for a human brain to process.

"So how are lawyers ever going to solve that challenge? Because they leave, breathe data. They are knowledge workers," said Kuhn, who is also the director of product marketing at the enterprise information management company OpenText.

Previous iterations of the panel focused heavily on case law and predictive coding, but Kuhn felt that there were already enough panels at Legalweek that touched on those areas. If you're afraid that what's left over won't take up the full hour… well, maybe pack a lunch.

D'Ambra could do a few minutes alone just in response to the title "Why Lawyers Are Adopting AI Faster Than You."

"In today's environment we're literally drowning in data. … It's just tremendous amounts of data. We really have to look for ways to find the information we really need effectively and artificial intelligence does that very well. It does that even better than a human reviewer could do it," D'Ambra said.

It helps that AI has now become a common fixture in the general practice of law. D'Ambra said that as recently as five years ago, most lawyers would have said that they only applied predictive coding tools to "special cases."

She sees a shift happening, not just in the number of lawyers making use of AI, but also with regards to the sophistication of the technology itself.

"Predictive coding was a very sort of rudimentary type of artificial intelligence. Now we're sort of building on that, and now we're really talking about a much more expansive use of that," D'Ambra said.

Speaking of expansive, D'Ambra is expecting to devote at least some of her time on the panel to advancements like chatbots, which firms are using to supply clients with the answers to simple legal questions.

Sentiment analysis, entity extraction tech and how AI can be used to review complaints and briefings are also on the itinerary, but not without some consideration paid to the ethical quandaries such capabilities pose.

"Things around the ethics of AI lawyering are very important and bias is in AI is a very real thing and that's one of the things that our data scientist is very excited to explore," Kuhn said.