Why is AI adoption so much stronger in transactional work than in litigation?

Top comments · 8

• 24↑u/dmonsterative
  Because transactional practice plays to LLMs strengths. The contract being analyzed or negotiated and the playbook a contractual LLM tool draws upon are much more of a closed universe (perhaps supplemented with outside references, but not determined by them in the same way). The deal points, and its costs, benefits and risks are largely quantifiable. The task is precisely selecting which clause should come next following the last within the current context window given the prompted parameters. And there's only one kind of work product to be concerned about: a contract, of one form or another. There's no judge, there's no jury. There's no fighting over obtaining and admitting evidence -- which is to say, what the facts for analysis and decision will even be. Which witnesses will be credible. Whose experts will prevail. Which attorney is more persuasive. Rather, the parties reach agreement, based on what they have to offer each other and their leverage over each other, or they don't. That's not how litigation works. (Except for hammering out settlement agreements.)
• 14↑u/tempfoot
  Same reason AI adoption is stronger with coders than sports referees. Have you practiced in those areas? One is highly bounded, structured, predictable, Somewhat formulaic and has relatively measurable success criteria and gradients. The other encompasses nearly every form of conflict imaginable, lots of lying, lots of strategy, lots of reading people, often in realtime, in an environment that imposes more external ethical frameworks including a duty to serve as an officer of the court. It’s messy and outcomes and success criteria are very nebulous and resistant to testing. How is a probabilistic text generator incapable of internalizing any incentive (or consequence) structures going to gain traction there…other than as a completely generic writing aid or generic parser/timeline generator for big doc production?
• 12↑u/PosnerRocks
  Litigator here. The tools suck, that's why. They fall into several camps of suck. The first is they are made by people who do not understand litigation and its requirements. They stupidly think we will just spend the time explaining to them every nuance of our profession. The second is the ones made by large institutions for the lowest common denominator ala TR and Lexis. They use older and dumber models to cut costs. They can't appeal to the nuance of every 50 state and Federal so they fail at all of them. And they are slow because they are massive institution. The third is people lazily putting out products that are basically no better than just using Claude myself. Then you have the fact that transactional has a LOT of flat fee arrangements and in house counsel looking to reduce their outside counsel expenses. So any amount of contract review, due diligence, etc that you can keep in house, that is big savings on legal expenses. So there is a LARGE incentive to adopt these tools at every major company. You will not see that for litigation. Only the largest companies handle SOME litigation in house and even then it is usually just managing outside local counsel. These firms have very little incentive to adopt AI tools that will make them more efficient since it is less billable hours. They will only start adopting when there is some more competition in this market. Plus, litigation shops can be risk adverse given all the sanctions to lawyers with hallucinated cases, so there is hesitation in adoption. They are playing it very slow and careful due to malpractice risk. Let alone risk to their firm reputation and bar license. There are some tools out there that I use and like, but it is a small number. Edit: See you also tried to tackle eDiscovery of all things. This is what I mean. That is a huge bear and requires a huge amount work to actually make a platform useable, not to mention how much trust you'd need to use it. You had a conversation with a litigator friend and thought "Easy enough, I can build that." Maybe you would have a chance if you worked at an eDiscovery company for a few years to get a sense of what exactly goes into the major platforms.
• 7↑u/hereditydrift
  Same reason it adapts so easily to math, programming, and tax. Finance, contracts, diligence, structuring, etc are largely logical steps with very little creativity. Lots of boilerplate. The facts and numbers are usually fairly certain. I did a decade+ of transactional then tax in NYC before switching to a lit focus. They're two very different beasts. Part of the reason for leaving transactional and tax was because it became boring due to repetition (and I fucking hated working with the ass clowns that are PE groups). Sure, a few outliers that were unique and fun, but largely repetitive.
• 7↑u/Legal_Beats
  Transactional lawyers are basically playing with a giant spreadsheet where AI is great at matching clauses and playbooks. Litigation is an adversarial poker game with unpredictable judges, hyper-specific local rules, and zero room for an LLM to hallucinate a fake citation on a motion.
• 4↑u/noshi47
  Too much at stake and litigation has so many more variables than transactional and requires more judgement
• 4↑u/Suitable_Wonder5256
  Is this an advert? I notice OP is the creator of the retriever plugin.
• 3↑u/Dingbatdingbat
  In litigation, AI errors are more likely to be caught quickly.  The OC and/or judge will absolutely destroy an attorney who uses AI. In transactional work, the issues might not be uncovered for a very long time, if ever, and plenty of transactional attorneys will gleefully accept mistakes by OC that work to their advantage without ever pointing out the mistakes.