Lawyers need to be digitally adept to cater to clients’ needs: Harvard Law School's Prof David B Wilkins

Harvard Law School Vice-Dean David B Wilkins recently said that lawyers will have to be more digitally adept to meet the intersecting needs of clients today..“Lawyers are being encouraged to have a more digital and data-driven approach to risk. Clients, especially businesses, need lawyers to quantify risk factors. Businesses are willing to invest in technology that help them measure risk. This opens tremendous opportunities for lawyers that serve organisations. With more and more geopolitical unrest around the world, lawyers are going to get asked how all of it affects their clients - be it a public government body, a private organisation or individual or an NGO, and all of this is going to make lawyers themselves embrace technology,” he said..Prof Wilkins was delivering the 9th Dr LM Singhvi Memorial Lecture at Jindal Global University on the theme The Future of the Legal Profession in the Age of ESG, ChatGPT, and Gen Z – and What it Means for Your Career..In his address, Prof Wilkins shed light on challenges the next generation of lawyers will face with the progression of technology.“With the onset of ESG, ChatGPT and other technology, as the Chinese saying goes, 'we are living in interesting times', but that's not a compliment. Times are interesting because they're difficult and challenging. We are living through three interrelated crisis - a global health crisis (COVID is not done with us yet) and a volatile global economic and political situation…..A few years ago, no one had heard about ChatGPT, except for professors in this niche. Within a few months, everyone was talking about it. ChatGPT in the US passed the Bar exam. They could be a certified lawyer. Even scarier is that it passed the medical exams. That to me is more scary than the law. All of this was done by GPT 3. When Microsoft introduced GPT 4 last year, the computing power was 1000 times more!".On the possibilities of ChatGPT eating up legal jobs, Prof Walkins shared the response he received when interacting with GPT. The tool mentioned --"It is estimated that ChatGPT could replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs , but it may lack empathy creativity, judgment that are essential for some legal work like negotiating, meditating or advising clients. So ChatGPT may need human supervision and guidance to ensure its outputs are accurate, ethical and compliant with law.".He also mentioned that tasks like sifting documents during a courtroom hearing, a task usually done by junior lawyers, may get automated and this has the potential to be sold as a Software as a Service (SaaS) product to lawyers and law firms."Microsoft has already invested $12 billion on AI. This is in the beginning going to become a welfare act for lawyers. Every single thing is going to be sued - copyright infringement, hallucinations, who owns the trading data. So it's going to replace a bunch of legal jobs and also create a lot of jobs for lawyers.".Jindal School of Government and Public Policy Dean Prof R Sudarshan spoke of Dr LM Singhvi's contributions in the evolution of Indian democracy and the Indian Republic."Dr LM Singhvi played an instrumental role in creating an ombudsman which ultimately led to the establishment of the Office of the Lokpal. He was described as the VIBGYOR man. He was friends with everyone across the political spectrum - Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jawaharlal Nehru, JP Narayan, and was a very deeply spiritual person by nature.".Executive Dean of Jindal Global Law School Prof SG Sreejith gave the introductory remarks and Associate Dean Prof Nisha Nair delivered the concluding remarks..[Watch Video]