AI for Litigation Paralegals: Managing Risk to Increase Your Value – Q4 2024 Facts & Findings

Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public over a year ago, many generative artificial intelligence (AI) products have entered the legal technology market. For many firms, exploring generative AI is a priority for several reasons, namely efficiency, which is valued by law firms and their clients. However, for paralegals who focus on litigation and case management, the potential benefits of applying AI to their work may be tempered by skepticism and concerns about risks.

When paralegals explore generative AI, common questions arise. For example, how does AI generate information and answers? Can it produce an accurate work product? Does AI protect client data? Additionally, paralegals concerned about job security want to know how they can leverage AI to increase their value to their firms and litigation teams.

“I advise paralegals that they should not worry as much about AI taking their jobs as they should be worried about the paralegal who knows how to use AI taking their jobs in the future,” Ann Pearson, the founder of Paralegal Boot Camp, recently told the ABA Journal.

How can paralegals manage these risks and become efficient and effective using AI? This article will explore common concerns about AI and how to understand and reduce risk. Additionally, you will find strategies for using AI to tackle paralegal tasks so you can spend more time on strategic work and become even more valuable to your firm.

AI RISKS
In the context of litigation, paralegals are often called on to summarize documents, extract information, and structure data. As the number of documents and volume of data involved in matters continues to increase, the manual work associated with managing information becomes more costly for law firms. When applied thoughtfully, legal AI tools can help paralegals complete these tasks more efficiently with automation, but first, they must navigate the risks that may arise with information silos, lack of context, and lack of trust.

AI SILOS AND PRIVACY
When using generative AI, paralegals must be aware of its potential to create information silos. For example, if a paralegal is constructing a chronology of events, they could use AI to speed up the process by asking it to identify relevant events across scores of documents. However, how they perform that task can have efficiency and security implications. If you were using ChatGPT (which some firms do not allow because of privacy issues) or a standalone legal AI tool, this process would require you to manually export and upload documents to be analyzed and then move the AI findings back to your primary workspace before the information could be used.

While paralegals could save time by asking AI tools to identify relevant events for the chronology, the time it takes to manage the silos of information would cut into their return on investment. The alternative to siloed AI is AI that is built into the solutions you already use. For example, when incorporated into your case management solution, AI can analyze documents to identify chronological events and deliver results within one connected system that is cloud-based and data secure. Then the chronology results generated by AI are already linked to case documents, discovery material, and deposition transcripts. Explore the solutions your firm already uses, and ask if your providers offer integrated AI.

INTERACTING WITH AI
Another challenge paralegals may face when using AI is uncertainty about how to interact with it to produce helpful results. Indeed, anyone who has experimented with ChatGPT recreationally has likely encountered unexpected or irrelevant results, sometimes to great comedic effect. However, when using AI for legal work, paralegals must understand how to write prompts that AI understands.

Again, using the example of building a chronology, simply asking AI to identify all the events in a case involving 20,000 documents will not result in greater efficiency. Indeed, in a case that big, many irrelevant and duplicate events will be flagged, leading to more time spent sifting through the results. Giving AI the right context at the beginning can save a lot of time and frustration. Paralegals can train AI to identify relevant events by giving it information around the issues, parties, and disputes involved in the case. This approach, while requiring more thought about the question prompt, will lead to better output.

LACK OF TRUST
Throughout all industries and applications of AI, lack of trust is one of the biggest concerns and, in the legal industry, rightly so. Even the most enthusiastic legal tech advocate cringes when reminded of the well-documented story about an attorney who used ChatGPT to prepare a client brief that included multiple court decisions that did not actually exist.

A case can be won or lost on a single fact, and lawyers rely on paralegals to give them accurate and actionable information. Just like paralegals cite sources including case law when reporting findings to their lawyers, ask your AI tool to do the same when it presents its conclusions. If you are using AI that is integrated into your case management software, then it is only analyzing the case information that exists within the system, reducing the chance of irrelevant information being cited. This enables greater confidence in AI and saves you from having to track down the cited material, whether it is in a document or a passage in a deposition transcript.

AI CASE MANAGEMENT
In addition to the above example where AI can help in the construction of a chronology, AI can also help paralegals with tasks throughout the lifecycle of litigation, from witness preparation, depositions, and legal research to tracking deadlines, communicating with clients, and managing exhibits. Consider this sample workflow for a paralegal who is creating a work product for a litigation matter. The paralegal will need to:

• *Review content within documents
• *Highlight and extract pertinent information
• *Connect related data in the context of the task
• *Structure the data in an actionable format
• *Draft, review, and create the final product

 

In the past, all these tasks have tended to be performed manually. However, by using AI and automation in a way that reduces risk and improves outcomes, paralegals can quickly complete repetitive tasks such as building chronologies, drafting background reports on characters in the case, preparing electronic bundles for court, managing exhibits and transcripts, and compiling deposition designations.

Toni Marsh, director of Paralegal Studies at George Washington University, presented a CLE session last year at the Florida Bar Annual Convention in which she said AI helps paralegals more efficiently retrieve information, draft, and analyze documents, leaving them more time to plan cases, manage litigation, and recommend actions to their attorneys. These are higher-level tasks that, as Marsh said, use paralegal expertise wisely. In other words, by effectively using AI, paralegals can make themselves irreplaceable.

By managing the risks associated with AI and applying these best practices to complete manual litigation tasks more efficiently, paralegals can eliminate pain points associated with manual tasks and put themselves in a better position to perform more valuable tasks, boosting their value to the litigation team.

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Kim Bookout is a Senior Solution Consultant at Opus 2, a leading legal software and services provider. Opus 2 helps legal teams build winning case strategies more efficiently. Their cloud-based solution streamlines litigation processes by centralizing documents, evidence, transcripts, chronologies, and witnesses in one collaborative workspace. Opus 2 serves a growing list of top law firms, including the top 50 international firms and 88 of the AmLaw 100.
em: kbookout@opus2.com