I’m attending Relativity Fest this week in Chicago. Relativity Fest is put on by the e-discovery software provider Relativity. Relativity is one of the largest discovery software providers. Relativity Fest is its extravagant user conference. According to Relativity, there are a record 2000 attendees at this year’s show, the 15th annual one.

I attended a panel discussion early in the conference on the findings of an annual in-house counsel Survey conducted jointly by the consulting firm FTI and Relativity. On the panel were Ari Kaplan, the principal investigator for the Survey, Adam Weiss, Relativity’s Chief Legal Officer; Wendy King, Senior FTI Director; and Celia Perez, in-house counsel at FreightCar America.

This was the sixth such Survey. Kaplan talked to some 34 in-house counsel in 11 countries.

Deja Vu All Over Again

The panel opened with a discussion of the evolving role of in-house counsel. To sum up, in-house counsel believe they are facing more and more uncertainty. 85% of those surveyed believe the risks to their companies will be ever-increasing. They report they are also expected to be knowledgeable in all sorts of new and different areas as compliance and data privacy risks increase. In short, in-house counsel are expected to be experts on anything and everything. At the same time, in-house counsel continue to be challenged to do more with less.

The Survey responses and the panelists’ comments seemed to suggest the attitude toward these tools is still very much lukewarm

Given all this, one would think that in-house counsel would be leaping to use AI and GenAI to do such things as work that does not necessarily require legal expertise or to learn about new areas. Instead, the Survey responses and the panelists’ comments seemed to suggest the attitude toward these tools is still very much lukewarm. I frankly felt like, despite the quantum leaps in what GenAI can do since the introduction of CharGPT in November of 2022, I might as well have been sitting in a panel discussion in January of 2023.

The Survey Results

For example, according to the Survey:

  • 85% of the GCs say they are minimally or not at all prepared to deal with the risks of GenAI.
  • 55% of GCs surveyed are not using GenAI at all.
  • 44% say they don’t even have any plans to use GenAI tools.
  • 79% of those surveyed said their strategy to deal with widening risks and increased work expectations was to continue to rely on their law firms rather than turning to GenAI.

The Panelists

This lack of enthusiasm about GenAi was also reflected in the comments from the panelists:  

  • GCs don’t understand how GenAI works or where it can be used.
  • In house people are mostly confused about GenAI.
  • There are many risks associated with using GenAI, and you really have to know how to use it.
  • Use training takes a lot of time.
  • A benefits analysis should always be conducted to determine whether GenAI should be used.
  • In-house need to be sure that if their outside lawyers are using GenAI, they have to know how to use it.
  • You have to know how to prompt, and learning to prompt takes a lot of time.
  • There is more opportunity for law firms to use than in-house.
  • There is no need to worry about GenAI taking any jobs because significant validation and training will always be needed.

These are all valid points, but taken together, they seem to suggest a lack of enthusiasm or use of GenAI tools that could help them meet changing demands.

Anecdotal Examples

Somewhat consistently when asked how many people in the audience were using Gen AI, less than half raised their hands.  I witnessed a similar, if not greater, lack of interest in GenAI tools when I recently spoke to a group of legal aid lawyers. Like in-house counsel, these lawyers face a mountain of problems and issues for which GenAI could be, if not a game changer, at least a significant aid. But when I asked how many of the roughly 150 audience members were using GenAI, two raised their hands. When I asked those lawyers how they were using it, one said he used it to plan vacation itineraries. Only one was using GenAI substantively.

Another anecdotal example. I was on a call recently with several lawyers. We were talking about how to pull some relevant data out of a massive spreadsheet and compare various responses recorded in the spreadsheet with one another. When I suggested using Chat GPT for this, people laughed as though I had to be kidding.

The Rest of the World

Legal attitudes don’t, however, reflect the rest of the world. Doug Austin reported yesterday about recent research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis, Vanderbilt University, and the Harvard Kennedy School. According to this research, two years after the release of ChatGPT, 39.4% of Americans 18-64 reported using generative AI, with 28% using it at work

Only 20% of legal/social services workers are using GenAI.

 Another notable finding is that Gen AI is being used by a lot of people—not just tech workers. For example, 22.1% of workers in construction, installation, repair, and transportation regularly use generative AI in their work. But only 20% of legal/social services workers are using GenAI.

The Relativity Keynote

The Keynote the next day seemed at first to reveal a bit of a jarring disconnect. Phil Saunders, Relativity CEO, views AI and GenAI as transformative and will change how we all work.

But in light of the attitudes reflected in the Survey and by the panel on the previous day, I had to wonder why Relativity is investing so much in these tools.

Chris Brown, who was also part of the Keynote, cleared it up. Two reasons:

All the data being generated from the prompts everyone is providing to GenAI, and all the responses will be and are discoverable. And as Saunders and Brown explained, that’s a huge amount of data. (181ZB!)

As a result, we will see e-discovery requests being directed toward this massive amount of data. And litigators will have to be able to quickly review this data, which leads to Relativity’s “new” tool, aiR, for review. This tool, which was first announced at Relativity Fest last year, applies GenAI and Llm capabilities to review all this new data and old data faster and better than even TAR.

As I have written before, Ediscovery providers have traditionally paved the way for more use of technology in the legal industry. This is because data collection and review timelines compel the need for speed and accuracy, even at the expense of billable hours.

Necessity: the Mother of Invention

Necessity is the mother of invention. Perhaps the same is true for legal and the use of GenAI. Maybe it’s not Deja vu all over again after all.