Extract from Gordon Calhoun’s article “Reflections on a 45-Year Legal Career and Advice for Navigating AI in Law”
Approaching retirement and looking back on a 45-year legal career, I can reflect on the transformative influence technology has had on the legal landscape. From IBM Selectrics, carbon paper and shorthand, to mag card machines and word processors, copy machines and Dictaphones, to email, social media, cloud computing, data analytics and predictive coding, to Generative AI, multiple technological generations have reshaped attorney workflows, propelling us into the digital age.
The pace of advancing from one game-changing technology to the next has rapidly accelerated. A year ago, just before ChatGPT 3.5 became public, my colleagues and I expected technologies like quantum computing would be needed to transition ediscovery from sorting data to providing insights into text and evaluating extensive video content. With the sudden emergence of ChatGPT 3.5, the projected breakthroughs are already at our fingertips, surpassing our expectations and seamlessly integrating into our daily workflows.
The advent of GenAI brings our industry to a crossroads. It is both solving our most pressing challenges, freeing us from the boring and minimally productive, providing powerful insights, and requiring us to look closer at the way we work and how to use data responsibly.
