I return again to a subject I touched on in this article back in February 2023 — contract drafting and the potential impact of ChatGPT. Since then, firms and legal teams have been busy experimenting with and understanding large language models. Back at the start of the year, most of…

Lawyers are very busy people. When you are a practising lawyer, you often don’t have time to breathe between all the client work you are doing. Often, you are so busy that you are eating lunch at your desk while simultaneously trying to draft an urgent document that needs to…

When making a piece of software, it’s easy to get excited. You think about all the weird and whacky things you could put into it. You start creating long lists of amazing features, conversations beginning with “what if…” go wild and you start believing you can change the world. Then…

During the pandemic, knowledge sharing became more difficult for law, firms and legal teams. Traditional ways of sharing knowledge, such as listening in on meetings and calls and in-person training events, no longer worked. As a result, in the last few years, there has been an increased focus on knowledge…

In my years as a practising lawyer, I never once worked with a project manager. To those outside the legal industry, it might seem bizarre that my firm was implementing multi-million dollar transactions without this kind of resource. But there was a good reason for it…often, lawyers are the project…

People working in software development are always on the lookout for ways they can optimise how they work. For example, linters are plugins that live inside a code editor that can tidy your code up as you write it. Coders working on front end code can use libraries such as…

It seems that law firms have been grappling with the question, “how can we be more innovative” for nearly a decade now. But a quick search on Google search trends for “legal innovation” shows that interest in innovation in the legal sector is, at least from a Google search trend…

If there was a slowdown in interest in AI towards the end of the 2010s, this has been reversed in the most dramatic fashion in the 2020s. 2021 saw the unveiling of DALL-E, a deep learning model developed by OpenAI to generate digital images from text prompts. Late 2022 saw…

Hype and oversimplification We are seeing more and more excitement in the legal industry about the promise of language learning models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s various GPT models. Already, people are pinning their colours to the AI mast by claiming that lawyers will be replaced by AI and making statements such as “Chat…