Doug Nash, co-chair of the Intellectual Property Litigation Practice Area and co-leader of the Medical Devices and Communications & Networking Technology Teams, shared his insights on AI use in the legal industry in the BC Law magazine article “When Justice Meets the Machine.”
“I think attorney training, mentoring, and development is the biggest challenge faced by law firms with AI,” said Doug, who’s a Boston College Class of 1996 graduate and a member of Barclay Damon’s AI Committee. “One of the hardest parts of my job as a law firm partner is training the next generation of lawyers to be able to stand on their own two feet. That’s hard normally, let alone with the arrival of AI. I prepare for a deposition or write a brief in a certain way, and I try to impart that. If the process is part of the journey, I think everyone is struggling with the idea of inexperienced lawyers accessing a shortcut right out of the gate. There’s a lack of context and they haven’t necessarily been taught how to do things properly.”
Barclay Damon has set boundaries regarding young attorneys’ use of AI. If they use AI to support their work, they must disclose which platform was used, what prompts the platform was given, and the specific results that were generated.
“This practice affords us a way to redirect them,” said Doug. He also noted that before using AI, Barclay Damon attorneys are directed to make sensitivity to confidentiality issues their primary focus. “It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s at least an avenue to attack the problem.”
Click here to read the full article.