Catherine Kemnitz: Avoiding the Great Gen AI Wrecking Ball: Ignore AI’s Transformative Power at Your Own Risk

Extract from Catherine Kemnitz’s article “Avoiding the Great Gen AI Wrecking Ball: Ignore AI’s Transformative Power at Your Own Risk”

Tech innovations are always disruptive to a greater or lesser extent—think about the PC, Microsoft Word, the internet, the iPhone, all revolutions in their day—yet nothing compares to what we’re experiencing now with artificial intelligence (AI).

I think of it as the “gen AI wrecking ball,” a force that’s fundamentally different from past disruptive technologies in reshaping how we operate and how legal work gets done. Unlike past legal tech innovations, the generative AI wrecking ball actually presents an existential threat to legal organizations that don’t get their AI act together sooner rather than later.

Our industry has historically struggled with technology adoption, maintaining a certain defensiveness about the specialty and sacredness of our profession. That resistance now comes at a cost. While other industries have progressively adopted (or even rushed into the arms of) new technologies and established clear metrics for measuring their value, legal hasn’t.

The emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and now, a flood of legal-optimized or specialized LLMs and AIs (such as DraftPilot, Harvey, Leya and others) has created a moment of reckoning. We can no longer look the other way or bury our heads in the sand.

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