When GPT-4 – the latest version of OpenAI’s language model systems – was released in mid-March, several aspiring lawyers and law professors used it to take the bar exam. The Large Language Model chatbot passed every subject and performed better than 90% of human test takers.
This news was a bit shocking, undoubtedly, and raised numerous questions. Preparing for the bar exam, for most unassisted humans, necessitates 10 hours of daily studying for nearly three months (after completing three years of legal education). Suddenly, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool can pass the bar easily.
What does this development mean for legal professionals? How will the advancement of language models positively or negatively impact the way legal professionals learn, teach and practice in the new technological landscape?
Currently, there are ongoing conversations about how language models can beneficially assist with legal writing (such as producing the first drafts of legal documents like contracts and conducting legal research). A junior attorney, for example, can save time by using GPT-4 to locate relevant legal statutes and regulations, identify potential contradictions in documents and pinpoint missed arguments. With this assistance, the attorney can then focus on higher-level tasks that require the kind of critical-thinking and analytical skills that language models do not yet have the capacity to master.
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