Lawyers must embrace AI, stop seeing them as superhero

Lawyers must embrace AI, stop seeing them as superhero

Vieira de Almeida's Paula Gomes Freire is positive about future where machines motivate business competence, but humans stay in control

Highly unpredictable times it is now! We were adjusting to live in an increasingly unstable, uncertain and unclear world even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit us. The pandemic has taken this to a new length.

As lawyers, our future is inseparably linked with the future of everything including the opportunities that can come with binding technological change for good. How to connect this change for growth among all walks of business and social life, in our cultures, the variety of our workplaces and among our leaders?

These issues have captivated me throughout my career but have come into particularly sharp focus now. The world is undergoing such rapid technological change. This thought process led me to write a book, Sustainable Success, which is a survey of technology, culture and leadership – not just within the law firms but also the extensive knowledge of sector and society. The book brings a vision of the future along with the views of experts across Europe to project an optimistic prospect where machines will drive business proficiency.

Technology will force us to repair things, not substitute us.

Lawyers are traditionally highly resilient to change and the prevailing view among the most successful is that "if it aren't broke, don't fix it". However it is distinct that technology – especially the advent of AI in law – will force us to fix things. If we do not, the system will ultimately break.

Besides huge challenges, there are also opportunities. I can see a future where humans will continue to flourish, despite all the dystopian predictions of a world where people are exchanged by machines. How AI can supplement the skills of knowledge workers in new ways will must be our focus. As lawyers, our question is whether our work can be done better and in new ways by machines or not. The question for law firms is how, in the future, the most competitive businesses will solve the problems to which they are currently the best answer?

So we need to make sure that in making AI effective it serves us and not the machine. "We are in the wild west" without any actual regulation, said one contributor to the book. As presently, this does not exist. We must all ensure AI is regulated sensibly, globally. It should serve the interests of humanity and is used for social good – delivering trust, transparency, fairness and non-bias.

For the many, not the few

To understand and bind the power of technology, lawyers need to learn to cooperate on equal terms with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines. Lawyers must stop seeing themselves as some sort of superhero and realise that technology can arm them with aptitudes they do not currently enjoy. It will switch some repetitive tasks, but that will free us to do more interesting and more planned work.

We already know that as we hold automation in creative ways, the upside has to be equal for us and our clients. The advantages it will bring for clients will lead to demands for transparent pricing and lower costs. This will definitely challenge us and may eradicate the old billable hour model. We should be set for this unreliable future.

Leadership and culture

In an age of hyper-uncertainty, the old style of visionary leader is out-of-date and we are instead seeing the emergence of "balance-sheet builders", focused on cultivating partnership. This will call for an entirely different kind of leadership – one that is more about asking questions than providing answers and more about trust than control, but coupled with the capability to create a sense of direction and assurance about the future.

Purpose and culture are the building blocks of flexibility, the constants that allow you to prepare for whatever the future holds. At Vieira de Almeida, we encircle technology but our aim continues to be to build a trust-based, combined culture that puts humans – whether our clients, people, suppliers or community – at the basics. As we develop from the pandemic into a world in which tech-enabled remote working features far more than in the past, culture will be as significant as ever.

I remain positive about a future world where machines, especially AI, will drive efficiency in business. But that progress must not come at the expense of the skill of humans to manage it. Rather, human effort and skill should be at the heart of the technological uprising so that progress serves humanity. We all have a role to play in ensuring this happens.

Paula Gomes Freire is group executive partner of Portuguese law firm, Vieira de Almeida.