CLOC Australia co-lead notes that it has yet to translate to major legal service delivery change
Looking at percentages, Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Australia co-chair Anna Golovsky believes that Australia has overtaken the US when it comes to generative AI deployment.
“I think the pace of adoption of new technology in Australia is very high. In fact, if you look at the state-of-the-industry survey metrics of the APAC community in comparison with the global community, I think we've got more GenAI deployments as a percentage in Australia compared with our US counterparts”, she told Australasian Lawyer in an August interview.
Golovsky acknowledged that pilots factored into the percentage, but maintained that the wider AI adoption across Australia was indicative of the market, “where we've always run leaner”. Nonetheless, Australia’s quicker pickup has not meant that legal service delivery in the country has changed significantly.
“We haven't yet seen the transformational change in legal service delivery that is expected. We haven't yet seen real translation of efficiency dividends or changes in the way that law firms are pricing for services - that is still to come”, she told Australasian Lawyer.
Golovsky noted that Australian law firms are scrutinizing requirements in technology adoption and business model transformation.
“Right now, I think teams are focused on adoption, upskilling and use case identification, which are all critical”, she said. “I think the key is going to be around how we identify the processes and the workflows within the context of the delivery of legal services that can be automated and/or made more efficient through the use of an AI-powered technology solution”.
Golovsky expressed her expectation that AI would be part of all technology within the legal ecosystem.
“Teams need to get their knowledge and know-how in an AI-ready state. A core piece of technology that will start to become really critical is one that will allow teams to index their knowledge, use metadata to apply to their knowledge assets so that they can be surfaced in AI in a more efficient way”, she told Australasian Lawyer. “This technology would be in parallel with document management systems or systems of record where the knowledge assets are stored, so that you can curate your repositories and enable AI to leverage them”.
The “ultimate transformation change”, Golovsky said, comes through full workflow overhaul.
"It has to be changing the entire end-to-end workflow of components of legal service delivery, not just component parts or tasks within a workflow" she told Australasian Lawyer.
