The newly published “AI Guide for Legal Professionals: A Foundational Overview” provides vital information and critical assistance for how best to leverage AI tools to benefit your legal practice
Key insights:
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AI is now a common facet of the legal landscape — AI is increasingly a part of legal workflows across aspects of the practice, involving not only work matters, but also interactions with clients, opposing counsel, and the courts.
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Foundational understanding of AI in legal is crucial— The guide provides concise, practical information that lawyers and legal professionals can use to get a better grasp on AI use in legal practice
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Guidance needed in a fast-changing environment — AI technology and its uses, its limitations, and lawyers’ professional responsibilities in the practice of law are evolving rapidly — and this guide provides needed guidance and help in navigating today’s environment.
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AI is influencing virtually every corner of the legal profession, impacting how legal research is conducted, documents are drafted, discovery is handled, client expectations are managed, and how courts are addressing questions of professional responsibility. Whether lawyers themselves are using AI or not, they are likely to at least be on the receiving end of AI-assisted work product from opposing counsel or clients.
To help bring clarity to this rapidly changing legal arena, the Thomson Reuters Institute and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) have released the “AI Guide for Legal Professionals: A Foundational Overview” — a resource for lawyers and legal professionals who want to approach AI with clarity, confidence, and professional rigor. This “Foundational Overview” is the first installment of the “AI Guideline Series” being published by Thomson Reuters Institute and ILTA, with additional guides to be published within coming months.
You can also access the newly published “AI Guide for Legal Professionals: A Foundational Overview” on the ILTA website (subscription required)
For AI-enabled lawyers to be the most effective, it’s important that they first understand the complex legal and technical terminology related to AI, as well as the different categories of AI, within which legal practice these technologies best fit, and the professional responsibilities that accompany their use.
Practical, concise overviews
The AI Guide is a resource for establishing a solid foundation by using the most current information in this fast-moving environment. Written with contributions from a variety of leading attorneys, legal scholars, and legal technologists, the Guide offers lawyers a practical orientation to today’s AI landscape and the issues that matter most for their legal practice.
The Guide contains concise overviews on:
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- the current state of AI adoption across the legal profession
- essential AI terminology
- the major categories of AI technologies and platforms
- the situations in which AI is often used to support legal work
- the ethical and professional responsibility considerations that lawyers must understand, and
- the emerging trends likely to shape AI use in legal in the years ahead.
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The Guide also offers a collection of additional resources for more in-depth exploration.
As AI shows itself to be remarkably effective at assisting with many routine, time-consuming, and information-intensive legal tasks, it also continues to require careful human judgment, verification, and oversight to be most effective. That’s why understanding AI’s strengths and its limitations is becoming an essential professional skill.
A different way of interacting with information
Unlike previous technologies, AI is not simply another software application. It is a fundamentally different way of interacting with information — one that’s capable of generating analysis, drafting documents, identifying patterns, and assisting with increasingly sophisticated legal work.
AI’s application within the legal profession brings forward unique, specific considerations. It also raises questions — as well as answers that are still evolving around accuracy, trustworthiness, ethics, professional responsibility, and many other issues.
Today, these are no longer theoretical discussions; rather, they’re practical questions that lawyers are confronting every day, regardless of whether those lawyers are currently using AI in their workflows.
The “AI Guide for Legal Professionals: A Foundational Overview” can give lawyers a foundational understanding on how they and other legal professionals can integrate AI into their legal practice, better understand their responsibilities, and critically evaluate new AI technologies as they evolve.
You can access the newly published AI Guide for Legal Professionals: A Foundational Overview here
