Morty: “Another fine meal, and now for my Wizard tip calculator.”
Jerry: “Dad, it’s got lots of other functions.”
Morty: “Don’t worry. I’ll get to the other functions.”
There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry buys his dad a pocket organizer that his dad promptly dubs a “tip calculator” and then uses exclusively as a calculator. Because he’s old and doesn’t understand technology… it’s not a particularly unique premise. Eventually, the elder Seinfeld learns to his horror that Jerry spent an exorbitant $200 (385 in 2024 dollars!) on the device, and Jerry ruefully protests, “It does other things!”
After a week embedded within the legal technology scrum at ILTACON, it seems generative AI might prove quite the tip calculator.
What can generative AI do for legal? That’s what everyone’s talking about, from Goldman Sachs saying upwards of 44 percent of legal tasks could soon be handled by AI to Goldman Sachs announcing that AI is a dead-end technology. Head-spinning really. There are a lot of legal tasks that generative AI can already tackle — or at least can soon tackle with the help of vendors building on top of existing GenAI tech — but there are also pie-in-the-sky robot lawyer tasks that are a long way off… if they’re even worth bothering to pursue.
But after a lot of conversations and demos and press releases… the “killer app” for generative AI in legal — at least right now — might be the user experience it provides.
Speaking with the team from DISCO, they told me that analysts informed them that while they historically saw no partners directly interfacing with document sets and only around one out of three associates engaged in the technological side of the review, switching to DISCO — and with its GenAI system “Cecilia” — they saw “three out of three associates in the tool and two out of three partners in the discovery tool.” These are senior lawyers who either never interacted with the technical side of discovery or had so thoroughly farmed out that task to ALSPs for the last couple decades that they’d forgotten what it was even like. Now they’re playing around with the set directly. Cecilia, like the Seinfeld organizer, “does other things,” though whenever anyone who doesn’t use tech starts to use tech, it’s a big deal.
And when those senior lawyers start to gush about the power of the product they’ve just started using… what are they really talking about? Are they actually talking about the generative AI or the tech that’s been driving the tool for years that they never bothered to check out until an AI interface showed up?
Because eDiscovery platforms had sophisticated technology assisted review mechanics long before ChatGPT began hallucinating caselaw or Grok started vomiting up copyright violations. And while new users might characterize everything they see behind the curtain as “AI,” that’s really just the window through which they’re seeing all the advances they’d overlooked.
Indeed, advances that they probably stymied with a toxic melange of distrust and motion practice. As Dave Lewis, Chief Scientific Officer of Redgrave Data, noted:
I’m kind of hoping that Gen AI could just reboot some of the conversations around TAR. Because we’ve gotten in this really kind of very unfortunate place with TAR, where we’ve got very good technology [and] people are afraid to use it because they’re going to get dragged into some sort of crazy motion practice… and I think there’s no reason for it.
Lenora Gray, a data scientist at Redgrave, flagged the profound psychological effect of OpenAI’s decision to unleash its technology in the form of a chatbot. Everyone ports that interface over to their GenAI applications and it’s the catnip that’s brought tech avoiding lawyers into this space with an enthusiasm unseen since the Blackberry.
So maybe Morty Seinfeld’s tip calculator isn’t the best analogy. Blackberry took legal by storm because it provided an easy and intuitive way to make sure associates were billing at 4 in the morning. Just because generative AI could offer unheard of insights into modeling biological molecules doesn’t mean we should snort at its ability to make a $2000/hour partner feel comfortable with technology. If it’s bringing broader tech adoption to the legal space then it’s value goes way beyond anything else AI can do. User experience matters and it should be measured by taking into account all the underutilized value it’s bringing to the table.
The thing about using a bazooka to kill a cockroach, is that it may be amplificatio ad absurdum, but it handles that cockroach. And killing cockroaches is a noble pursuit.
Earlier: Generative AI… What If This Is As Good As It Gets?
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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