AI and Generative AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is evolving at pace and is quickly spreading into many aspects of our day-to-day lives, from healthcare diagnosis to financial advice, from education to virtual personal assistants.

AI has been in use at Macfarlanes for a number of years, as part of the suite of technologies that our lawyers use in the context of their day-to-day work and our Lawtech team utilises to build technological solutions for our clients. It is regularly used to support document review and due diligence, as well as bespoke deal and data point analysis, amongst other things.

Generative AI in the legal industry

AI has seen a significant evolution towards generative AI in recent years, given its greater sophistication and ability to support a wider range of day-to-day tasks. Generative AI is able to draft, summarise and analyse on demand based on specific instructions.

The use of generative AI tools in the legal industry is rapidly developing the landscape for how technology can augment the work that lawyers carry out and the services law firms provide to clients. Macfarlanes is an early adopter of generative AI technology – our clients are at the forefront of their industries, and it is important that we are at the forefront of ours.

Generative AI enhances our lawyers’ work by supporting them to do elements of their jobs in a better, smarter and more efficient way, with everything produced by the technology thoroughly checked by our lawyers. Generative AI tools create efficiencies that translate into client benefit by enabling our lawyers to focus on client’s strategic priorities and more complex work.

As with broader AI technology, we use generative AI technology in many of the bespoke solutions we build for our clients.

Our approach to AI is led by the firm’s Lawtech team.