Ushering AI Into the Legal Field

John Weaver went from real estate law to a national voice on the future of artificial intelligence

Super Lawyers online-exclusive

By Jessica Ogilvie on February 28, 2024

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John Weaver was reading The New York Times just over a decade ago when he stumbled on an article about self-driving cars, suggesting that the technology would be widely available by 2020. He was struck by the possibility of so much change so quickly.

“There was this whole undiscovered country of legal work associated with this technology that doesn’t exist right now,” he recalls thinking.

Weaver, a longtime attorney with McLane Middleton in the north Boston area, took it upon himself to explore the field, and now, he’s one of the nation’s leading voices on AI and its implications for both the legal field and other industries.

“It just happened to be something that I got interested in,” he says, “and McLane was nice enough to give me a lot of rope and resources to find my own way.”

Before delving into the unknown territory of artificial intelligence, Weaver focused exclusively on commercial real estate. Now, he does both, joking that he is the only thing at the center of the Venn diagram of the two areas of practice. But these days, as more and more industries are trying to harness the power of AI, Weaver, who serves on the steering committee for the American Bar Association’s Artificial Intelligence & Robotics National Institute and is the chair of his firm’s artificial intelligence practice, finds himself in constant demand.

“The [threat of hacking] is the same as it is for firms who use iManage or any cloud services. So a lot of the same information security tools and technologies should be deployed on these AI systems. They’re not foolproof.”

John Weaver

Two primary concerns are facing attorneys at the moment: the ways AI technology impacts their clients, and the ways it impacts the practice of law.

When it comes to clients, whose needs and desires are myriad depending on the industry, a primary concern is the question of privacy. “Depending on how it’s deployed, AI has the potential and likelihood to create inferred sensitive information,” says Weaver.

For instance, a person who repeatedly uses Google to research skin cancer may not realize the search engine tracks those search terms. Google might infer that the searcher or someone close to them has been diagnosed with the illness. 

“That’s absolutely sensitive health information that has different protections around it,” says Weaver, “and the person whose personal information that is might have no idea [it’s] been inferred about them.”

For practicing attorneys, the concerns are similar. Weaver frequently advises other lawyers to not provide client data to publicly available generative AI applications like ChatGPT, because those applications “don’t have the confidentiality, privacy or security that we would expect lawyers to implement with their vendors.”

However, there are still uses for AI that have the potential to save attorneys hours of time. Weaver uses the example of inputting a lease provision to determine if it’s landlord-friendly or tenant-friendly.

“It does a pretty decent job of that,” says Weaver, “and that doesn’t have any client information.”

But, he says, what he envisions to one day be the most useful application of the technology for practicing attorneys are programs known as small language models—as opposed to large language models, such as ChatGPT—which are essentially closed systems that exist on a firms’ servers. These would allow users to generate first drafts of documents like commercial leases based on prior in-house examples, and some tech startups are already working on them.

Weaver calls this the “holy grail” for attorneys, although he notes that as with any technology, the possibility exists for it to be hacked.

“The [threat] is the same as it is for firms who use iManage or any cloud services,” he says. “So a lot of the same information security tools and technologies should be deployed on these AI systems. They’re not foolproof.”

A few firms, including Dentons and Gunderson Dettmer, have announced the launch of closed AI systems, but most are experimenting with the technology quietly. Weaver predicts these systems will be more widely available, and more widely deployed, within the next two to five years.

Currently, most startups that are developing this technology are working in broader terms on products that would not be exclusively for the legal field, but could be applied across businesses. But that could soon change.

“I think there will be small language models that are developed and marketed specifically to law firms,” he says. “There’s going to be a cottage industry that focuses on the legal profession.”

He also sees the potential for AI products to assist in access to justice, particularly for pro se litigants in disputes such as those between a landlord and tenant, or a domestic violence dispute—the types of cases in which a significant power disparity exists. “An AI assistant or an application that can walk them through the process, help them fill out the forms, help them in court could be a real boon to increasing access to justice for people that really could use the help,” he says, “and the legal profession simply has not found an economic way to help them.”

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