Extract from Rick Clark’s article “From Artificial Intelligence to Change Management: Key Takeaways from the 2024 Future Lawyer Conference in Boston”
The Future Lawyer 2024 Conference was held in Boston, MA, and hosted by Ropes & Gray LLP in their Prudential Tower offices. This two-day event hosted private practicing attorneys the first day and corporate in-house personnel the second day.
The law firm day topics hovered mostly on how Generative and Predictive AI are gaining more steam in the legal industry, with the corporate agenda track more focused on change management. What was surprising to me? The general sentiment that Generative AI is still under development but will eventually create incredible solutions for a wide array of legal processes. Potential AI applications are outlined below.
The conference was emceed by Zach Abramowitz, Founder of Killer Whale Strategies, kicked off the conference with opening remarks about the exciting growth of AI in the legal industry. His first and most powerful statement was on just one application of AI, “Legal Ops isn’t outsourcing their legal research questions”: the use of AI in Lexis Nexis and Westlaw has made it easier for in-house teams to do their own legal research rather than traditional outsourcing, and not enough teams are taking advantage of this new way of getting traditional legal work done.
In her keynote, International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) CEO Joy Heath Rush emphasized the value of “Innovation and the Race to be Second.” She highlighted at this conference that coming in second is still a win, contrasting it with the failure of those who merely follow the crowd like lemmings. She discussed the legal industry’s precedent-driven culture, noting that innovation isn’t limited to technology but can also mean improved processes. To innovate effectively, she advised defining success, setting realistic quality levels, valuing quick wins for hypothesis testing, reviewing, and iterating, and accepting limited failure to encourage safe innovation. Her key message: race to be second when it makes sense but avoid being a lemming.
