ILTACON 2024 Key Takeaways

By: Sahel Khan

Sales Engineer, Frontline Managed Services

AI in the legal industry is here to stay. There is substantial adoption of AI in the areas of e-discovery and document summarization.

AI has dominated the ILTA conversation since 2021. Over half of the educational seminars this year were centered on AI, and almost all legal tools and services were either AI focused or AI powered. In addition to what was mentioned above, AI is also heavily utilized in the industry for drafting and outlining new documents or finding and reviewing existing documents/data.

Governance is key in adopting AI in firms. There are many challenges and considerations in implementing AI for production, document drafting and outlining. It’s important to have strong information governance in place, particularly in determining who has access to what data, and how AI can only be implemented.

When an AI acts beyond its intended limits, you’ve got what’s referred to as an AI containment problem. Strong information governance protects law firms from the risks – whether of legal liability, financial loss, negative publicity, or client trust erosion – associated with poor AI containment. Information governance requires classifying and then segmenting data so that proper role-based control can be exerted to ensure the right people are accessing the right data at the right time. For law firms, this typically centers and aligns with who can bill to which matters. Therefore, in order to make effective use of AI, we need to consider point 3.

AI adoption should only be considered after establishing robust data segmentation and compliance, particularly regarding access to privileged information, such as financial, IP, and health data.

Billing systems need to integrate closely with matter management, and matter management with document management. Information governance can then be applied through correct data segmentation and compliance rules. This, in turn, will extend safe avenues to the implementation of AI.

Test, test, test: Implementation of AI should be preceded by ensuring compliance, and knowing that any non-compliance could pose a significant risk and should not be used.

A phased approach is recommended, starting with deployment to internal or non-client facing operational teams, then client matter teams, and finally external parties.

The conference focused on the areas of “harmony” between AI, eDiscovery and the use of various tools for data extraction and management. The concept of "harmony" is defined in this case of the different systems working together to maintain accuracy and synchronization.

Frontline can assist our clients both to build the foundational elements for safe AI utilization, and recommend/deploy AI tools once those foundations are in place. We’re experienced and focused in the legal industry and its specific needs.
We support all major legal and practice management tools, document management systems, while our DevOps teams commonly creates integrations between them.
Our security teams can get our clients AI-ready by evaluating their security policies, standards, controls, and procedures, remediating or implementing governance where necessary.
The conference focused on exploring the concept of “harmony” between AI, eDiscovery, and the use of various tools for data extraction and management. “Harmony” in this context refers to the seamless cooperation of different systems to ensure accuracy and synchronization.