Sohini Shrivastav is Founder and Director of Lexo Consultancy, based in Mumbai. In this interview with Asia Law Portal, she explains how she helps lawyers and law firms adopt and understand AI and Legal Tech, how law students can best prepare for a tech-enabled career, and her goals for the future of Lexo Consultancy.
What impact is AI having on legal practice?
There are several ways in which AI is transforming legal practice. Firstly, it enhances efficiency by automating routine tasks such as document review, basic drafting, summarizing, due-diligence etc., allowing lawyers to focus on more complex and strategic work like negotiation, case analysis and complex drafting of documents etc. Secondly, AI, when used well, can improve accuracy in the aforesaid tasks, reducing human error and leading to faster turnaround time. This will automatically lead to increased client servicing capacity for lawyers, Additionally, in future, AI tools will enable predictive analytics based decision making, helping legal professionals anticipate case outcomes and assess risks more effectively or frame their arguments keeping in mind the potential counter-arguments. This shift in technological adoption not only speeds up legal processes but also makes legal services more accessible, as AI-driven solutions can reduce costs for clients.
Having said that, for lawyers, there are some obvious red flags like data privacy, hallucination in AI generated work and even client sensitivity in billing while using AI in their work. We must understand that AI is developing, and the best versions of AI Tools for lawyers are yet to come.
What are the most important things lawyers need to know about AI and legal tech?
I would say, it is very important to align expectations while using AI. AI and Legal tech in their present form can be an efficient intern but not an expert guide. Lawyers need to understand the capabilities and limitations of AI usage in their legal practice. This includes knowing which tasks can be efficiently automated and the importance of having guard rails in AI Usage and fact-checking AI outputs. It’s extremely important for lawyers to be familiar with ethical considerations, such as data privacy and the potential biases inherent in AI systems. Legal tech on the other hand, has a long learning curve and often does not produce immediate results for the users owing to the gap between a lawyer’s expectation from a product and the vendor’s vision of a product. I also feel that AI and legal-the education in India is still not institutionalized, thereby leading to a lack of understanding in lawyers on how to use this technology. For increased AI Adoption in the legal industry, AI education is a must.
How can law students best prepare for a career in law in the context of the continued adoption of AI and legal tech in law practice?
First of all, Law Schools in India must sit up and understand that Legal Technology is here to stay. The Law School curriculum must include a paper on basic understanding of AI and Legal Tech which must be delivered by experts or persons proficient in such usage. Till that is done, at an individual level, law students should focus on gaining a strong foundational knowledge of law while also building tech proficiency. In the next few years, a law graduate having a fair understanding of AI and Legal Tech will have an obvious advantage in recruitment over a student not having these necessary skills. This can be achieved by taking courses in AI and legal technology and related fields such as data privacy and cybersecurity. Participating in internships or extracurricular activities that involve legal tech applications will provide practical experience. Law firms can assist in this endeavor by providing access to their legal tech products during internships, incubating AI and Legal tech solution providers by giving access to their data sets, mentoring students etc. Having said that, an absolute dependance on AI for legal work is also not desirable.
Legal-tech- as the name suggests, is an intersection of law and technology. For starters, a hackathon on a legal tech problem statement, with each team comprising of a law student and an engineering student is probably something which will produce exciting results.
What are your goals for the future growth of Lexo Consultancy?
We started in March last year as an online learning platform, providing quality AI and Legal Tech education to law students, lawyers and law academicians. Very soon, we started receiving requests for one-on-one consultations on AI and Legal-tech and we pivoted. At Lexo Consultancy Private Limited, our primary goal is to stay at the forefront of AI and Legal Tech advancements and providing unbiased Consultancy Services in AI and Legal Tech adoption for law firms, inhouse legal departments etc. We aim to expand our consultancy services by partnering with more law firms and corporate legal departments to help them integrate AI tools effectively. For our learning and training programs, we customise modules based on the needs of the organisation. We have very recently started partnering with law firms in providing bespoke low code interventions for their practice. Something which does not require a legal-tech product level of investment, but at the same time can alleviate a pain point of their practice effectively.
We have, as a policy, consciously avoided partnering with any specific legal tech product so that our consultancy service stays unbiased. We are aiming at vertical expansion currently – wherein we can be the one stop service provider for all things AI and Legal tech for a law business. Horizontal growth will happen over a period of time. We are strongly focused on maximizing efficiency for our clients through our services. As AI is evolving, we will see many new opportunities open up in this space.
