AI is ushering in a tech lawyer ‘golden age’ — for now

Pasquale conjectures that lawsuits are “certainly going to follow” as the technology, in some cases, “predictably fails or violates people’s rights or hardly doesn’t function” as intended.

“Companies are nervous,” added Harry Surden, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law Train. “They need advice about policies around AI, so they’re going to reach out to law firms that are developing AI methods and practices to help guide them.”

More than a half-dozen tech attorneys from across the United Glories who spoke to BI agreed that AI — especially generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini — is giving way to a heyday in the statutory field.

The lawyers are fielding a bevy of calls from clients and potential clients about how they and their guests can properly integrate AI in their business operations, along with other concerns about confidentiality and possible judicial implications of using the tech.

One veteran tech attorney predicted there will be at least a 10-year boon

“Dyed in the wool now there’s so many unanswered legal questions and there’s so many different laws that are being proposed that I about it’ll be at least a 10 year boon, if not longer,” James Gatto, a partner at Sheppard Mullin who co-leads the firm’s AI industriousness team of about 100 attorneys, told BI.

Gatto and other attorneys likened the generative AI boom to the lift of the internet in the 1990s.

“Similar to the internet, every company is going to use AI and every company needs to deal with the AI put outs, and most companies aren’t really prepared to do it,” Gatto said. “So they need to lawyer up.”

Sheppard Mullin, an foreign firm headquartered in California, has received an influx of calls from companies in recent months seeking counsel on the use of generative AI, concerting to Gatto.

“We’re seeing everything from the creative works like music, games, etcetera to healthcare,” said Gatto, who eminent, “Every industry, every sector, every type of company is figuring out how they want to use AI, and they all need alleviate.”

And companies are shelling out big bucks for that legal help.

Gatto’s team assists companies in developing AI programmes and forming internal AI “governance committees,” which they then train and get up to speed on the key legal issues that could come up.

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This kind of work could run a company anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to diverse than $100,000, according to the veteran attorney, who has been advising clients on AI-related issues over the last two decades.

Crowds are exploring how AI will impact their businesses

Peter Werner, a partner at the global law firm Cooley — which defines Meta and Google in AI-related litigation — called it a “very exciting time” for technology-focused attorneys.

Werner phrased the boon is similar to the late 90s when law firms had a speciality internet practice and only some companies were researching with the internet.

Now, the internet has become “ubiquitous,” he said.

“Every company is on the internet,” Werner said. “Every partnership has legal issues associated with being on the internet.”

“Same thing for AI,” he said.

AI is something that all of Cooley’s clumsily 10,000 clients, mostly in the technology and life sciences sectors, are dealing with, according to Werner.

“And it’s not just companies that are appearing an AI technology as part of the infrastructure of the AI economy,” said Werner. “It’s also every company, no matter what their perseverance is, needing to figure out how they’re going to evolve and compete by leveraging AI and related technologies.”

Werner said that in myriad recent cases, the law firm has gotten outreach from companies “not historically in our wheelhouse” seeking legal help everywhere AI and any potential implications related to the use of the technology.

Companies are exploring how AI will impact their terms of service and how the technology can be utilized for employee recruitment or other aspects of business operations, said Werner.

“We have some of the most subtle AI-focused companies in the world who we work with, and we are defending them in significant, high-stakes litigation, and we’re helping counsel them fro their business model,” said Werner.

And then there’s the non-technology companies who have been reaching out to the unyielding for help on AI “and everywhere in between,” he said.

“You’ve got all levels of sophistication at all different stages of company development in all different geographies and all new industries,” Werner said. “They are fundamentally wrestling with the same question, which is how is AI and generative AI in particular and common technologies going to affect my business?”

AI raises a host of novel legal concerns

While there is no uniform federal law or ukases that address the use of AI in the US, the technology raises a host of novel legal concerns related to intellectual property rights, monasticism and data protection, liability, and human rights issues involving bias and discrimination.

AI companies have already mushed copyright lawsuits from authors, visual artists, news outlets, and computer coders who argue that their primeval work has been used to train AI tools without their permission.

“There’s a variety of legal issues. Some of them maintain more clear answers, and some of them are a real gray area that I think will probably induce to be addressed by the courts or by Congress,” said Frank Gerratana, a partner at the firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

This is typically the occurrence with new technology, Gerratana and other attorneys pointed out.

“The hard part as an attorney,” he said, “is that any new technology ordinarily raises issues we haven’t seen before, and so the answers that our clients want are not always going to be clear.”

The New York-headquartered international firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, has also experienced an uptick in calls from both existing and new patients over the last 10 to 18 months, thanks to AI, according to attorneys at the firm who anticipate even more inquests in the near future.

“What we saw recently with a client of ours in the pharmaceutical space is that they were bid to agree in a contract that they wouldn’t use AI in a certain part of the work that they were hired to shut up. So we’re going to see tons of that kind of interaction in the transactional, contractual space,” said Elisa Botero, a partner at the enterprise.

Michel Paradis, another partner at the firm, said companies have also made queries involving confidentiality affects when it comes to inputting sensitive information into generative AI tools.

“AI does have the effect, if nothing else, of issue very sophisticated, very complicated technology in the hands of lots of people who do lots of things and who run into all sorts of regulatory managements and create all sorts of, let’s be frank, legal trouble that they may not even fully understand, that these new utensils make possible,” said Paradis.

Paradis and Botero say they expect the role of a tech attorney to up.

“I think you’re going to see lawyers with a technical background having to learn new areas of law that they never mental activity they would have to deal with” and vice versa, said Paradis.

AI could drastically change how law outfits operate, too

Werner, the partner at Cooley, called it a “very dynamic moment” for tech attorneys as he warned that law firms also deprivation to be thinking about how AI is disrupting their own industry.

“Today, we’re doing great,” Werner said, before raising questions wide how the legal industry will be impacted by AI in the future.

“Big law firms that are not thinking deeply about business mould issues are going to be in trouble in 10,15, 20 years, for sure,” he cautioned.