Moving House, Automation, Lawyers and GenAI

What is the connection between moving house, automation, lawyers and GenAI?

Well, I recently spent time helping move my mother-in-law out of a house she has been in for 30 years as she downsizes and relocates.

As anyone who has moved house knows, it is a major operation. Even more involved when you can’t take everything with you.

Moving House and GenAI: Decisions to make

Decisions must be made: Keep, sell, give to friends and family, give to charity (which ones?) or dump.

Then the logistics of transporting things to charity shops, making trips to the dump, packing things up, dismantling things, organising selling, uplifts and removers.

It is very involved and labour intensive. Surely in the age of robots and AI it could be automated? Not a chance.

AI couldn’t sensibly make the decision for the relocator of what to keep, sell, give to friends and family, give to charity (which ones?) or dump. Only one person can do that, the relocator themselves. I wouldn’t dare to make that decision for my mother-in-law never mind suggesting AI did it for her!

As Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Dex:

Well, if droids could think there would be none of us here, would there?

Moving House and GenAI: Physical lifting

Then onto the physical stuff. The Tesla Bot, that Elon Musk said (three years ago) would be going to the shops for us by now, is still not on the shelves. When (if) it is (ever) available will it actually be going out shopping for you? Are there not easier ways to do that already? Online shopping with deliveries to your door perhaps? Imagine it transporting things to charity shops, making trips to the dump, packing things up, dismantling things, organising selling, uplifts and removers. Not anytime soon.

Even if it could be trained to do any of these things the pace and effectiveness would be that of a snail as it stuttered around C-3P0 style but with a little less finesse.

AI for Laundry and Dishes

Just this past week the following image has been doing the rounds on social media:

Author and videogame enthusiast Joanna Maciejewska was quoted as saying:

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

Linas Beliūnas posted on LinkedIn:

Nailed it! Joanna Maciejewska gives the only perspective on AI that matters 👏

That’s exactly why Elon Musk has been building Tesla Optimus humanoid robot.

The next 2-3 years will be wild.

I commented:

Does Joanna and Elon not realise the washing machine and dishwasher were already invented some considerable time ago? We don’t need a Tesla Optimus humanoid robot or any AI involvement to do those tasks for us.

That generated 59 replies mostly telling me I had missed the point about art or that the problem of loading and unloading those machines and doing the ironing remained unresolved. Someone even suggested that you still needed a Tesla Bot to hang the laundry on washing lines. The invention of the tumble dryer being missed by them (although I appreciate there are environmental reasons for using a washing line when and where you are able to do so).

I, however, had simply answered the point by Linas Beliūnas about the Tesla Bot being the answer to all of this. Like we don’t need a Tesla bot to do our shopping for us we do not need one to do our laundry or dishes. And if we humans think we really need to eliminate the short time taken to load/unload a washing machine or dishwasher there are dystopian times ahead:

The main point is that we do not need AI to fulfil a task that is already adequately taken care of by existing technological means and where the introduction of AI might well actually slow the speed of performing that task down from where we are at just now.

What the experts think

Those with more knowledge than me seem to agree. In a recent article by Elizabeth Gibney in Nature entitled ‘The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?‘ the conclusion was:

What the future holds depends on who you ask. [Rodney] Brooks says that robots will continue to improve and find new applications, but their eventual use “is nowhere near as sexy” as humanoids replacing human labour. But others think that developing a functional and safe humanoid robot that is capable of cooking dinner, running errands and folding the laundry is possible — but could just cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “I’m sure someone will do it,” says [Alexander] Khazatsky. “It’ll just be a lot of money, and time.”

Missy Cummings on LinkedIn pointed out:

AI & robotics has been a thing for A LONG TIME. Because LLMs and derivative neural net tech does not know anything, there will be no new revolutions. These models will possibly help but robots have to work in the real world with real world comm latencies.

It does no one any good to promote the hype and then set us up for another winter.

Lawyers and GenAI

At the same time as I was thinking whether moving house could be automated, I was seeing a lot of debate on LinkedIn about lawyers automating using GenAI. Well, that debate has been going on for some time now but there was a particular little peak of activity around Klarna (the Swedish fintech company) revealing that its in-house lawyers were using ChatGPT to produce contracts in preference to the lawyers in Big Law firms it once instructed.

Apparently the ChatGPT tool “massively” reduces the time taken by Klarna’s lawyers to draw up contracts. Their senior managing legal counsel, Selma Bogren, said:

The big law firms have had a really great business just from providing templates for common types of contract. But ChatGPT is even better than a template because you can create something quite bespoke.

She went on to say:

Instead of spending an hour starting a contract from scratch or working from a template” you “can tweak a ChatGPT draft in about ten minutes.

Starting a contract from scratch or working from a template are two entirely different things that certainly do not involve the same amount of time being spent on them. If the former took you an hour then the latter might well be 10 minutes or less by comparison. Your ChatGPT version, on the other hand, will require a detailed prompt (more on that later) to generate goodness knows what (certainly not your familiar template) to then be thoroughly checked and amended (merely tweak it at your peril). That all sounds a lot more involved than 10 minutes.

Standardisation v Goodness knows what

Standardisation is clearly not a priority at Klarna. Let’s see how they get on with a plethora of different ChatGPT styles when a contract is, or contracts are, in dispute. Will they then be calling on big law rather than ChatGPT for assistance I wonder?

Some commentators on LinkedIn thought this was the bee’s knees and lawyers would be losing their bread and butter left right and centre. The usual line about adapting or dying was strung out for all to see.

Others, including myself, saw through the PR hype generated by Klarna. GenAI should not be your first port of call for a first draft contract. If it is then you will have inconsistent contracts across your organisation, your in-house lawyers will probably spend twice as long checking and correcting, and you just might expose yourself to greater risk in the future if that contract is at the centre of a dispute.

Conveyancing and Automation

Legal work, like moving house, has a lot of parts to it that must be considered. A new piece of tech that strings words together and takes a guess on the next best word to add to a sequence just might not be the best starting point.

And whilst on the topic of moving house what better legal process to look at than conveyancing.

The conveyancing process

The conveyancing process (like physically moving house) has many parts to it, such as (if acting for the purchaser and this may be a bit Scottish law focused as that is where my knowledge comes from):

• Taking instructions on the offer to be submitted.
• Opening a new client/matter.
• Requesting and checking ID for AML purposes.
• Requesting and checking evidence of source of wealth and source of funds for AML purposes.
• Drafting and submitting the offer to purchase.
• Receiving an acceptance to that offer (usually a qualified one) and seeking instructions on that.
• Drafting and submitting a further qualified acceptance or a concluding letter.
• Examining the title deeds and raising observations arising from that examination.
• Drafting the disposition (title transfer deed).
• Receiving and perusing loan instructions if a lender is involved.
• Drafting the Standard Security (mortgage deed).
• Submitting the Certificate of Title to the lender and requesting funds.
• Examining the searches.
• Asking for and examining other documents that may or may not be necessary depending on the circumstances involved in each transaction.
• Providing your client with a statement showing the funds required in addition to any lending to settle the transaction.
• Drafting and submitting an Advance Notice to Registers of Scotland in respect of the Standard Security.
• Receiving funds, transmitting funds to the seller’s solicitors and settling the transaction.
• Drafting and submitting LBTT (Stamp Duty) forms together with payment.
• Drafting and submitting Land Registration forms.
• Receiving the updated Title Sheet and sending that to the lenders and your client.

Is GenAI the answer?

Can GenAI deal with all that for you. No it can’t and it probably never will (despite the suggestion at the Legal Geek Growth Conference this past week that someday conveyancing will be done in 20 seconds!). Any small aspect that it might just about manage to currently do is likely to be a poor substitute for using other well established technology instead.

A lot of that conveyancing process can be automated (but often isn’t) by existing case management and document automation technology. That technology has been around for at least 30 years. When used to its full potential, and with necessary human assistance, many steps specified above can be made faster and more efficient through the use of pre-defined templates automatically filled by linked data specific to each individual conveyancing transaction. APIs can link the conveyancing case management system with other external portals to fulfil certain tasks that require third-party processing.

ChatGPT can do very little, if any of that. Don’t be misled by the PR stunts of Klarna. ChatGPT is not a magical answer. However, you might just have the actual answer in your own law office in the shape of a case management system you bought some time ago but have never properly implemented (also known as shelfware). Now is the time to actually implement that. Not to play about with GenAI. If you want to see real digital transformation in your legal practice.

ChatGPT and Prompting

Earlier, I said I would come back to ChatGPT and prompting. That was to highlight a post by Nicola Shaver, where she asks “are prompts the new precedents?”

Shaver claims that some law firms are developing entire prompt libraries like a clause bank or precedent bank. Some of these prompts are very long. Their solicitors can then search for the best prompt in the library to then input it into ChatGPT.

We are known to have differing views when it comes to GenAI use in legal practice.

My first thought on reading this was how nonsensical it was.

I commented:

I hope they are not creating a prompt library to then have ChatGPT create documents that would have been better created and stored in a precedent library in the first place or are already there 😉. And what are they using to find the prompt they might want to use?

I then had an afterthought:

… oh and having spent ages developing a prompt that gives you a good answer, given that you know the answer may not be the same each time then why not save the answer in a ChatGPT output library rather than the prompt to recreate it or perhaps not?

It appears to be another case of use cases that are not really use cases. This Venn diagram being very apt:

Damon S. more bluntly referred to it as a “fugazi” (not genuine, fake, a fraud). A word that could be used to sum up much that is said about AI at the moment. Maybe we should start referring to hallucinations as fugazis!

Image credits: Star Wars © Lucasfilm Ltd; WALL-E © Disney / Pixar

Reactions on Moving House, Automation, Lawyers and GenAI

On LinkedIn the following comments have been made:-

Alex Heshmaty (Wordsmith at Legal Words):

I really enjoyed reading this blog – especially your diatribe re ChatGPT prompt libraries 😂

Me:

Thanks Alex. As always, I enjoyed writing it too. The act of doing so (without any ChatGPT assistance – other than for some of the images) really helps to make you think things through.

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Graeme Johnston (once a lawyer… | now doing software stuff):

A gram of focus on concrete challenges (as in this blog) is worth many kilos of generalisation.

I have to ask if the prediction at LGG about conveyancing taking 20 seconds was elaborated upon — was the b____chain mentioned as part of it, or is that now the Tech Which Must Not Be Named?

Me:

Thanks Graeme. I’m afraid I can’t elaborate on the 20 seconds prediction as I didn’t attend the talk but just saw that reference made about the talk in question on the agenda. Strangely, although only three days ago the entire agenda (from which some more information might have been gleaned) has been wiped from both the Legal Geek Growth App and their website! Legal Geek don’t seem to want a record held of what was debated in the past. I wonder why 😉 Maybe, someone who attended the talk in question can enlighten us?

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Paul Ryan (Looking for investment to scale up our Web and Mobile Apps For Legal Business):

It’s frustrating in that AI could be a genuine game changing technology in CREATING the full automation that so many firms have failed to. That was always the hard boring part. So creating new automation platforms that can be rendered and deployed by AI by means of intererpreting a normal flow chart could take out months of work required in that. It’s just that none exist yet.

It’s also true that AI may well have a bigger part to play in monitoring security given the single biggest security threat legal tech has ever seen and took out 100 mainly conveyancing firms for a month arose from simple human configuration error and previously unidentified single points of failure. Nobody wants to talk about that though. It’s always about “how can this help us do more for less”

Me:

Indeed Paul. I think we also need to separate AI from GenAI as possible game changing technology. The former might be capable of achieving what the latter never will. All focus seems to have moved from the former to the latter though 🤔

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Deborah Parry do Carmo (Raising the bar in legal and financial translation since 2002 • Lawyer-Linguist • CIoL-certified • Dutch/Portuguese to English • Specialisms: Succession, Tax, Insolvencies, Investor Relations • Triple national: UK/SA/PT):

Conveyancing in 20 seconds? I’ll have to tell my younger daughter she has let me down massively this past week then. She managed to complete it in three weeks on my smaller apartment in Portugal (no mortgages to cancel or register and we had the energy certificate, etc. ready beforehand). Clearly that’s not good enough. I’m guessing I won’t be able to repeat here what she says when I express my “disappointment”. 😉

Me:

I think conveyancing in 20 seconds is a Legal Geek hallucination or should that be a fugazi, as I concluded in my blog post as being the word that can sum up much that is said about AI at the moment! (cc Damon Sieputovsky, PhD)

Deborah Parry do Carmo:

I’m going to make fugazi a go-to term in translation: “ChatGPT fugazied the translation of the website copy and sales plummeted.”

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Antti Innanen (⚫ Ⓜ️ 🍄):

Is GenAI now supposed to help with deeply personal decisions, like what belongings to keep and what to throw away?

Setting the bar so high that no digital tools—barring magic—can ever meet it is unrealistic.

A more balanced take is that LLMs can be valuable for some lawyers in specific cases, while contract automation tools might be more suitable in others. And often, these technologies aren’t interchangeable or mutually exclusive—you can leverage both your existing tech and GenAI tools.

Just because contract management tools don’t help with moving doesn’t make them bad tools, just unsuitable for that task.

It’s good to call out AI hype, and your blogs often do a great job of that. However, I feel there’s a strong confirmation bias. But maybe that is needed sometimes to balance out the AI hype.

What I REALLY disagree with is the advice to focus solely on contract management (or other digital tools) and AVOID exploring GenAI.

”Now is the time to actually implement that. Not to play about with GenAI. If you want to see real digital transformation in your legal practice.”

That’s just bad advice.

Me:

At one point it appeared that GenAI was supposed to help with anything and everything. Thankfully, that viewpoint appears to be changing as the limitations in the model become apparent (even although I think that was fairly clear from the outset).

We are still struggling to see what the “specific cases” may be that might give some value to lawyers.

Experimentation to find them appears to still be the main use in legal.

My advice is not to focus “solely” on contract management (or other digital tools) and “AVOID” exploring GenAI.

It is to actually look at your current digital toolbox and get that properly working before you get distracted by GenAI.

That’s just good advice.

But by all means play with GenAI if you have a spare moment or two to create some images of droids moving house or the like.

I have and it is quite good at that. Although I might have to do a blog post on the outtakes where it decided to hallucinate and morphed different well known droids together (with no prompting regarding any of those droids being included).