Lawyers, meet your AI ‘twin’

May 29 (Reuters) – At many law firms, calling a colleague at 2 a.m. is a last resort. At Ohio-based law firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, the colleague is always awake — because it’s AI.

The 375-attorney firm is rolling out one of the more eye-catching uses of legal AI that I’ve heard about recently.

Working with an AI-focused research lab at Stanford Law School, Vorys has developed “AI personas” of ​19 of its partners, which can be embedded within generative AI tools to offer responses to questions and edit documents in the style of individual partners.

Seemingly every major law firm is experimenting with ‌AI right now, even as firm leaders wrestle with the unsettling question of how it could upend their entire business model. In conversations, firm leaders can’t yet answer how AI will reshape attorney training or the partnership model as the technology matures, but many acknowledge the bigger risk is falling behind.

Many firms are working with off-the-shelf AI products, though some are trying to get an edge by developing their own tools. Kirkland & Ellis, for instance, said this week it will invest $500 million to develop its own AI technology that will pull from Kirkland’s internal intelligence.

At Vorys, trying to stay ahead has meant partnering with Stanford along with separately developing other AI projects, like ones to help with labor-and-employment research for HR professionals and patent drafting.

When I first heard Megan Ma, ​the executive director of the Stanford Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, also known as liftlab, talk about what she dubbed “AI twins,” I pictured little online avatars crafting legal documents. ⁠The reality is slightly more nuanced but still intriguing.

The personas essentially work as an AI chatbot that spits out replies and edits documents in the mindset of the partner. The digital personalities are developed from hours-long interviews about the attorney’s ​approach to practicing law, values and experiences. They aren’t trained on work product from the partners, but instead seek to embody their individual thinking styles.

“It’s almost like having a low resolution map of the person’s brain,” said Nate Jedinak, Vorys’ senior director ​of software, data and innovation. He said the personas have been used by both associates looking to improve their work and partners using them to “be creative and be their best selves.”

Wayne Stacy, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said that while he sees AI personas as being novel, he doesn’t think they’ll fundamentally change the practice of law. He said a more impactful approach is building AI workflows around the specific skills needed to complete a task successfully, rather than mimicking one attorney.

“The problem with personas, at too granular of ​a level, it glorifies the individual personality of a lawyer” and how they think something should be done, Stacy said.

Scott Powell, a federal tax, aviation and transactional partner at Vorys, said the firm sees value in creating individual personas rather than ​an aggregate “best M&A lawyer” or “top litigator.” He said such aggregate personas work well with basic questions but that the nuance and skill of specific attorneys give better results. The ability to chat with personas based on actual partners also better reflects how people act ‌in real life, ⁠he said, when lawyers seek feedback from a trusted colleague down the hall.

Powell said he was a bit skeptical about how the answers he gave Ma to create his persona would lead to meaningful advice. Once he started using it, he realized, “It was presenting results to queries that were shockingly sounding a lot like me.”

The firm is rolling out the AI personas firmwide after testing them with smaller groups. Leadership has made clear that they are not a replacement for an attorney. Like all AI, the tools that use the personas run the risk of hallucinations, but Powell said they emphasize that human review to check for accuracy is a necessary step.

During the test phase, one Vorys litigator gathered viewpoints from three AI personas to strengthen ​the legal theories in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief. ​An intellectual property lawyer worked with personas to do ⁠a deep dive on a troublesome portion of a patent. With the editing function, associates can redline a document in the style of a partner to get feedback before turning in a draft.

Vorys M&A partner Bruce Paige said he’s used litigator personas “to essentially pressure test” deal documents to look out for potential litigation risks, a step that used to be too time ​and cost-prohibitive on smaller deals.

Vorys is one of several law firms, including Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Davis Wright Tremaine, that are ​working as founding advisers with Stanford, ⁠as well as legal-industry focused AI companies Aderant and Harvey.

Another one of the lab’s projects involves making simulations to help with associate training. Instead of waiting years to sit at an actual deal table or deposition, associates can use AI to help develop skills. Dechert piloted a deal simulator from the lab with its summer associates last year.

Stanford officially launched liftlab in September to formalize work Ma — previously with CodeX, Stanford’s center for legal informatics — and law professor Julian Nyarko had been doing. Ma said she’s working ⁠primarily with Stanford ​engineering and STEM students, not law students, to develop technology to improve the practice of law. She said that as an academic lab, the goal ​is to create open-source research rather than monetize their work but that firms can choose to commercialize products beyond the research prototypes.

Ma said she thinks law in the AI era will go through a “TurboTax moment” akin to what the accounting industry faced when the now-widely used software first came out. “It ​wasn’t like all the accountants were fleeing,” she said. Instead, it helped sharpen into focus when human expertise was needed instead of just the technology.

“How we curate and assemble intelligence,” she said, “that’ll be the secret sauce and what persists.”

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