The Case for Generative AI in the Legal Field - Ep. 210

Thomson Reuters, the global content and technology company, is transforming the legal industry with generative AI.

In the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz spoke with Thomson Reuters’ Chief Product Officer David Wong about its potential — and implications.

Many of Thomson Reuters offerings for the legal industry either address an information retrieval problem or help generate written content.

It has a AI-driven digital solution that enables law practitioners to search laws and cases intelligently within different jurisdictions. It also provides AI-powered tools that are set to be integrated with commonly used products like Microsoft 365 to automate the time-consuming processes of drafting and analyzing legal documents.

These technologies increase the productivity of legal professionals, enabling them to focus their time on higher value work. According to Wong, ultimately these tools also have the potential to help deliver better access to justice.

To address ethical concerns, the company has created publicly available AI development guidelines, as well as privacy and data protection policies. And it’s participating in the drafting of ethical guidelines for the industries it serves.

There’s still a wide range of reactions surrounding AI use in the legal field, from optimism about its potential to fears of job replacement. But Wong underscored that no matter what the outlook, “it is very likely that professionals that use AI are going to replace professionals that don’t use AI.”

Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters aims to further integrate generative AI, as well as retrieval-augmented generation techniques into its flagship research products to help lawyers synthesize, read and respond to complicated technical and legal questions. Recently, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext, which developed the first AI legal assistant, CoCounsel. In 2024 Thomson Reuters is building on this with the launch of an AI assistant that will be the interface across Thomson Reuters products with GenAI capabilities, including those in other fields such as tax and accounting.