With gen AI’s potential growing in the e-discovery space, legal experts warn that a balance between understanding AI’s risks and accepting its increasing popularity is crucial.

During Tuesday’s “Balancing Ethics and Efficiency in GenAI and Legal” webinar hosted by Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), legal and tech experts explored the implications of adopting gen AI while simultaneously protecting clients and their information.

Gen AI’s Current Impression

Experts noted that despite gen AI becoming mainstream fairly recently in 2022, it’s gained a lot of momentum in the legal world ever since.

“I'm seeing the green light now,” said Reed Smith partner and board of project trustees chair David Cohen. “We're actually starting to use this stuff in our real cases and it does some things very well: It's a great research starter, it's great for summarizing long documents or groups of documents.”

Speakers also noted that they’ve observed legal professionals who might have been hesitant toward the technology at first starting to turn around.

“We've been using AI tools in incident response for a few years … attorneys who have hesitated to use it and were very cautious and didn't really want to go down that road, started to accept the fact that AI is here and it's going to be helpful and it's going to be efficient. So I think the last few months have brought on quite a bit of acceptance and more curiosity,” said Anya Korolyov, the vice president of cyber incident response and custom solutions at HaystackID.