Generative AI in Legal and Financial Fields

Generative AI has gone past hype and entered the rollout phase in law. Firms have moved beyond piloting and into building AI into the research, drafting, and review workflow processes. Tools such as Lexis+ AI, Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research/CoCounsel, and proprietary systems such as Harvey at A&O Shearman run enterprise-scale, highly governed, highly secure data environments with built-in audit controls. They analyze large corpora of documents, summarize legal authority, help draft and compare clauses, and monitor regulatory changes continuously. This is not about replacing the lawyer, but rather about taking away the drudgery of tasks so that lawyers can focus on their true strengths of strategy and judgment. Plus, it will democratize access, as AI-based services are much cheaper than attorney-based services for many clients. Independent testing has become much more realistic, too, in that recent studies evaluate not only "accuracy," but how systems cope with false premises, source grounding, and refusal to engage. (Wiley Online Library+1)