Generative AI is a foundational technology in the truest sense– it is a core technology that supports other new innovations. 
 

Whatever its current limitations, its capacity to help solve problems is only growing, therefore providing a valuable resource to support businesses with their operations and decision making. 

However, alongside the promise of opportunity comes a list of challenges we hear clients grappling with when considering implementation of generative AI. These include questions about reliability and keeping a human in the loop, concerns about information security and whether client data is being used to train large language models, as well as challenges relating to complexity of the infrastructure and frameworks required to safely use the technology within their own businesses.

Helping clients to realise the opportunities

At Macfarlanes, we have provided clients with technology-enabled solutions to legal problems for some time, and it is a natural evolution for us to incorporate generative AI. By creating our own solutions using generative AI, and giving clients the direct use and benefit of the technology, it allows us to offer customised solutions that directly address our clients’ needs, without the on-ramp often required to ensure its safety and utility. We treat our technology solutions as fundamental to the services we offer to our clients, enhancing the relationships we have with them, and the work we do for them.

In order to help our clients realise the opportunities presented by generative AI, and move past challenges, we focus in particular on the following elements.

• Understanding client use cases: any generative AI solution should actively solve clients’ problems. Clients should be in the driving seat, challenging law firms to develop personalised solutions tailored to their needs. Law firms also have a great vantage point from which to identify those problems and can take potential solutions to clients.
• Strengthening relationships: the relationships between clients and lawyers are built on deep expertise, trust and professionalism. While this is an obvious statement to make when it comes to traditional legal services, it is doubly important when considering innovation and introducing new technologies. Clients that are exploring generative AI collaboratively with their law firms will benefit from those pre-existing relationships, allowing them to share techniques, overcome challenges, and build solutions with impact.
• Managing data: law firms and clients regularly exchange documents and sensitive data. In response to evolving threats and increasing risks, law firms have expanded their sophistication and expertise in cyber security, understanding the nuance of how data can, and should be, handled safely by the systems that use it. Generative AI is still largely untested as a new challenge in information security: closer collaboration and the use of law firm built solutions that benefit from cyber security expertise can help alleviate this significant challenge for clients.
• Sharing the benefit of experience: implementing generative AI comes with its own challenges, from the basics of prompting for the best responses to ensuring the correct infrastructure is in place to support it. As law firms progress on their journeys to implement generative AI across their own teams, they acquire significant experience about the technology, how to use it, and how to get the most out of it.  Building solutions that leverage that breadth and depth of knowledge can help clients reap the benefits, whilst minimising the operational challenges required to get it working.

Strengthening relationships through innovation

Understanding the opportunities and challenges is important, clients want to explore generative AI in a safe, tested and reliable way - innovative law firms should be ideally suited to help them do this. 

At Macfarlanes, we understand the challenges and care required to make the most of generative AI and, crucially, the context of our clients’ businesses and strategic priorities to make that technology effective for them. Building generative AI solutions for our clients is an exciting next step in our exploration of the technology, and in strengthening the long term relationships we have with our clients.