A recent study by e-discovery services group Consilio polled 105 legal and technology professionals at last month's Legalweek New York conference, and found that 93 percent believe artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to either help or create more opportunities within the legal industry. Adoption rates, however, tell a different story.

Time management and cost reductions were the two largest perceived benefits of AI adoption identified by the survey. Thirty-five percent of those polled said AI could enable lawyers to spend more time on strategy, while 28 percent saw potential for cost efficiencies.

Amy Hinzmann, managing director at Consilio, hears a lot of questions from clients about AI. “In the context of e-discovery, people are asking about cost. They want to know how TAR 1.0 and 2.0 differ, how we're implementing continuous active learning into our processes, and when and why it makes sense for them,” she said.

Outside of e-discovery, Hinzmann sees the legal community engaging in a broader conversation about how the technology can and should shape operational practices. “That's more talking about how do we, as legal and compliance professionals, understand and embrace this movement to incorporate AI to improve processes, to create new processes and just become more efficient. A lot of our business partners are doing that already.”

Consilio's data seems to show that attorneys see the potential in AI. Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said AI was already affecting their day-to-day work; 95 percent said they expected it to impact their work within the next five years.

While attorneys may see great potential in AI, adoption rates for AI haven't come quite as quickly. A Thomson Reuters survey of corporate legal departments published last year found that, although 67 percent of those polled were open to new technology adoption, 50 percent were not interested in purchasing AI or AI-based tools.

Hinzmann noted that attorneys often are wary of potential issues of defensibility in new technologies like AI. “Lawyers don't like to be on the bleeding edge of anything. One of my clients who spoke with me on a panel put it best by saying, 'Lawyers are motivated by fear, and that's because the law is unforgiving.'”

Because a lot of the formal rules and laws around data practices are still being established, attorneys tend to be wary of becoming the law, rather than practicing it. “No one wants to be the case that everyone's talking about the next year at Legaltech,” Hinzmann said.

Attorneys surveyed for Consilio's study flagged some other potential downsides to AI's likely impact on the legal community. Twenty-nine percent believe that AI is likely to result in a loss of jobs within the legal community, while 28 percent see AI limiting opportunities for junior associates.

To help quell those fears, Hinzmann said that testing through sample sets and proving the value for attorneys can help show both the safety and practicality of AI across various legal applications.

“You can make an investment in that process by running parallel processes,” Hinzmann suggested, noting that running the same document set through a traditional and technology-assisted review (TAR) simultaneously can help demonstrate both the efficiency and defensibility of AI-based methods.

Hinzmann finds that helping attorneys feel comfortable with practical AI adoption may be as simple as setting some guardrails and expert systems in place to help ensure that practices don't veer off into the great, indefensible unknown. “As we implement these processes, let's implement some controls around it,” she suggested.