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2 July 2024 (Paris, France) -- At the legal tech conference in Amsterdam last week it was all AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI ...
Last year, as ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence chatbots were taking the world by storm, ASML - the Netherlands-based maker of chipmaking equipment - saw scope for hiring a “prompt engineer” to deploy the technology in its in-house legal department.
In a post on LinkedIn, ASML’s deputy general counsel, Douwe Groenevelt, said he envisioned “a new potential role that could bridge the gap between AI and our legal team”. The position called for a candidate (who had to be a lawyer) who could write generative AI prompts - the queries that must be fed into an AI tool to generate the desired output - and could train up colleagues.
The only catch: the job didn’t exist.
As Groenevelt has since explained, the intention behind that post, which attracted more than 1,200 likes and around 130 comments, was to contribute to the discussion about the future of legal roles in the age of generative AI.
Fast forward to this month, though, and the job has become a reality. ASML announced a genuine vacancy in its in-house legal department for a first-of-its-kind legal prompt engineer. It has concluded that, with the rapid development of AI tools, a dedicated role is warranted.
And the creation of this role is an indication of how the in-house legal profession is transforming itself to take advantage of generative AI, as companies around the world explore the risks and opportunities the technology presents.
Lawyers have been using other types of AI for years, in the form of tools for contract management and e-discovery. But generative AI is different, Auffret says, as it “seems to be genuinely capable of transforming our legal service delivery model and having a much more substantial impact”.
The large language models used by generative AI are “extremely good at automating and enhancing any text-based activities”, she says, “and it so happens that many legal activities are to a large extent text-based”.
ASML expects the technology to deliver substantial time savings for its in-house legal team — more than any other tool it has introduced, Auffret says. But it is also seeing an uptick in effectiveness and quality of service.
Its team was one of the first to try the ContractMatrix tool launched by law firm A&O Shearman late last year, Groenevelt says. Now, about 15 of the group’s roughly 100 in-house lawyers are using the generative AI-powered tool to draft and review contracts, he noted:
“Early feedback of the team shows that the tool does not only save us time with drafting, but also increases the quality of drafting. The tool can be asked to suggest alternative clauses, which also boosts your legal creativity".
Groenevelt says senior lawyers are getting more out of the tool than juniors, who may be more easily impressed with the initial results and less inclined to pressure-test them. He stresses that “human supervision remains essential”.
Other company legal teams have focused on experimenting with generative AI internally, rather than hiring specialists.
For example, Conduent — a business services company spun off from Xerox in 2016 — explored the possibility of hiring a dedicated AI position in its in-house legal department: a subject matter expert to review AI use within the department and across the business.
But it quickly realized that this was the wrong approach for the group, says general counsel Michael Krawitz, because generative AI touched on many sensitive areas of the business.
So, rather than hiring one individual, the company set up a working group of internal professionals with different specialities — such as intellectual property, regulatory compliance, privacy and risk — to explore how to apply the technology and appropriate safeguards.
Like ASML, Conduent, which has about 50 in-house lawyers, has been experimenting with how generative AI can be used in its contract work. Krawitz said:
“We went into a contract tool pilot thinking it would help us identify clauses that didn’t meet our standards, but the technology has not met our standards. The pilot was marking contract clauses as being compliant when they were not, which was concerning. Still, I remain hopeful that we’ll see that feature start to work well. For now, though, it is distracting and expensive".
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