ChatGPT-powered AI legal assistant launches and brings along fear

CoCounsel, the first artificial intelligence (AI) legal assistant, has been released, according to Casetext, a business that specializes in legal AI. 

CoCounsel, an AI software, performs tasks for law practitioners by utilizing the most recent large language model from OpenAI, tailored exclusively for the legal industry, as per a press release last week by the San Francisco-based legal software company founded back in 2013.

"Our AI legal assistant is the first of its kind," stated Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext. 

"It creates a momentous opportunity for attorneys to delegate tasks like legal research, document review, deposition preparation, and contract analysis to an AI, freeing them to focus on the most impactful aspects of their practice."

The attorneys can assign important, complex work to an AI assistant in the same way they would a legal expert claims the company.

CoCounsel is a safe and dependable tool created especially for legal concerns, as opposed to generalized, openly accessible huge language models.

The creation of CoCounsel was made possible by Casetext's integration of the most advanced OpenAI's GPT tech model with its own exclusive legal databases and Parallel Search, the top legal search engine in the market, said the press release.

CoCounsel's efficiency and high-quality output allow lawyers to concentrate on the most important aspects of their practice and take on tasks that would be difficult without it.

What will CoCounsel help with? 

CoCounsel is capable of seven essential legal tasks, such as searching a database, reviewing documents, summarizing those documents, checking contracts for policy compliance, extracting data from contracts, drafting a legal research memo, and assisting attorneys with deposition preparation, including by offering potential questions to ask a witness, according to Casetext. 

"Casetext has transformed the AI landscape with CoCounsel," said Scott Bailey, Director of Research and Knowledge Services at Eversheds Sutherland, a CoCounsel beta customer. 

"The power of this technology, deployed in a product that is secure and reliable, is a huge leap forward in what legal technology can do."

Casetext's AI program is overseen by a committed group of AI technologists and knowledgeable litigation and transactional attorneys in order to ensure the dependability and security of the CoCounsel.

The software spent approximately 4,000 hours training and perfecting CoCounsel's output based on over 30,000 legal questions, putting every legal skill on the platform through thousands of internal tests.

Meanwhile, in the press release, the larger implications for the legal workforce from CoCounsel remain unaccounted for.

The young lawyers who go through the grid to achieve knowledge, the legal fee paid by clients, which accounts for budding lawyers' work and more, will be highly disrupted, as per industry experts.