Artificial intelligence still hasn't made a true believer out of the bulk of the legal industry, according to the American Bar Association's recently released "Legal Technology Survey Report."

Of the 662 nationwide respondents that took part in the ABA's legal tech survey report, 51% said AI's accuracy was their top concern when implementing and leveraging AI-based technologies in their law firm. Reliability (48%) and cost to implement the technology (46%) followed closely behind. 

Still, some law firms and law firm tech consultants and providers say the hesitancy to adopt artificial intelligence is mainly based on not fully understanding how the technology would enhance a lawyer's practice.

"There's this expectation AI is a box you open and you let it run and that is it," said HBR Consulting senior director Andrew Baker. But the reality is, "the technologies and data required and inputs is very foreign to legal organizations. We are not surprised there was a number of letdowns and expectations may have been uneven."

Baker added that, outside of financial data, law firms are "document rich and data poor," and  because extracting data from those documents is difficult, it makes advanced analytics, automated documentation and other AI-powered legal services challenging.

"The data isn't accessible in the [classifications] of what you target and want to go after. Generally that's the current state of the market," he said.

While some law firms are struggling to collect and leverage valuable data, Baker noted smaller firms, which represented the majority of the survey's respondents, are at more of a disadvantage because they don't have the trove of data found in Big Law that benefits custom-made AI tools.

"I don't know if you have the volume of data that would require artificial intelligence to review for patterns," added Melissa Green of two-lawyer firm Linarducci Law and chair of the Delaware State Bar Association's small firms and solo practitioners section. "I can't say we've discussed it in our section."  

However, some lawyers note AI is finding a receptive audience in various sized firms, when the lawyer's practice entails reviewing massive troves of electronic data.

"I can see significant instances in the discovery process where artificial intelligence can make searching for data easier," said Edward Zohn of Zohn & Zohn and chair of the New Jersey State Bar Association's solo and small-firm practitioners group. Still, "in general, I don't see it as a broad issue for small law firms."

From the vendor's prospective, concerns over AI seem misplaced. Chris Ricciuti, vice president of product management for legal and compliance at AI solutions provider Veritone Inc. noted that while AI-backed software doesn't prevent all mistakes, it can be more accurate than traditional, manual services.

He explained that "what's being missed is that there is no way to do anything 100% [accurate] with a human unless you want to hire a team of people and spend a lot of money and it's not scalable."