Back in February 2023, the international law firm Allen & Overy gave its lawyers access to an AI chatbot to help them draft contracts. Almost immediately, this AI system began saving the company’s 3500 lawyers in the region of 2 hours per week. Later in the year, the company announced an AI system capable of contract negotiations, saving up to seven hours per negotiation.
The team come to this conclusion by asking senior lawyers to point out important legal issues in a set of real-world procurement contracts and then asking Large Language Models and junior lawyers to evaluate the same contracts. But speed-wise, the contrast was staggering. The fastest Large Language Model whipped through contract reviews in under a minute, while junior lawyers took 56 minutes on average.
And the potential cost-savings were similarly immense. “While a Junior Lawyer incurs an average cost of 74 dollars per contract review, the fastest Large Language Model performed the same task for approximately 2 cents,” they say.“The implications on the legal industry are profound and multifaceted,” say the researchers, with junior lawyers likely to be given more high value work earlier in their careers with routine tasks more likely to be given to AI systems.