How legal professionals are using AI with Christine Shin

What specific task or workflow in your practice, chambers or studies has AI changed most dramatically, and what does that look like day to day?

It has changed the way that our team performs contract diligence on our M&A transactions. Previously, we would have associates log in manually to online data rooms to review provisions and build a matrix. Now, we can download contracts into AI and it can generate a matrix automatically with lawyers reviewing the AI's work. This saves time and makes the diligence process much faster.

When you're using AI tools for legal research or drafting, how do you verify the output? What's your process for catching hallucinations or errors?

At the partner level, nothing has changed about the review process. AI is just like another associate, and I have reviewed the work output the same as if I would review work performed by an associate attorney. The difference is that AI works faster than a human to draft contracts and make changes, so you can see the AI work in real time.

Have you encountered a situation where AI led you astray or gave you problematic advice? What happened and what did you learn?

Yes. I prompted an AI tool to make a purchase agreement more seller favorable and found that it did not understand market practice or deal terms which a seasoned M&A professional would have understood.

How are you thinking about confidentiality and data security when using AI tools? What guardrails have you put in place?

We don't use AI at the moment with details, deal points or sensitive issues which are confidential and bespoke to a specific deal (other than diligence). With diligence, the app tools which we use have the similar data security functions as the online data sites where we downloaded the contracts from and the same or higher privacy protection measures which have already existed historically for many years in our practice since data rooms have gone virtual.

What kind of legal work do you think AI will never be able to do well, and why?

I don't want to say "never" because AI has come so far already in the past few years, but I don't believe that AI would be able to negotiate deal terms such as working capital adjustments, special indemnities and non-competes as well as humans in the near term. First of all, these negotiations often occur in person or on Zooms and you are debating a human in real time. I don't see how an AI bot, which generates written responses while prompted, would be able to do that without a human prompting it for answers.

If someone just entering the legal profession asked you how to think about AI in their career development, what would you tell them?

For young attorneys who are just beginning their career in M&A, I would say that it is getting all the more important to seek out a mentor. With AI, a young lawyer may learn how to prompt AI efficiently early in their career, but the concern is that they would not absorb the information that young attorneys used to be forced to absorb by manually reading the changes, making the changes, conducting the research etc. In this sense, they are going to need real teaching and mentorship from another attorney who already has these skills and it will require patience on the part of the associate to read the final work product and take his or her own notes because it is becoming too easy with AI to produce junior associate work product merely by prompting a tool.