Why Harvey & ChatGPT Destroyed My Desire To Attend Law School

If you know me personally and have spoken with me over the last year or so, you’ve likely heard some variant of my desire to attend law school. I seriously considered enrolling later this year, that is until last December.

Last December, I was messing around with ChatGPT and came across its ability to summarize legal documents. It’s very early, and the ChatGPT isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to pass the bar exam. Thus, for most people, it’s a better alternative than just signing agreements without reviewing the details in the terms and conditions.

This led me to think very deeply about the concept of building a legal LLM. I figured someone would make a Large Language Model trained on legal documents (which are very well structured and laws are based on precedent, which makes for excellent training data). At the time, this made the most sense, and I just thought it would start with parking tickets today and probably broker partnerships tomorrow. And because of this, I figured that my time would be wasted going to law school in 2023.

Well, that future is coming true:

Allen & Overy (A&O), the leading international law firm, has broken new ground by integrating Harvey, the innovative artificial intelligence platform built on a version of Open AI’s latest models enhanced for legal work, into its global practice. Harvey will empower more than 3,500 of A&O’s lawyers across 43 offices operating in multiple languages with the ability to generate and access legal content with unmatched efficiency, quality and intelligence.

So, what exactly is Harvey?

Harvey is a platform that uses natural language processing, machine learning, and data analytics to automate and enhance various aspects of legal work, such as contract analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance.

We’re at a point where Generative AI will probably have the most impact on the legal side. Even David Wakeling, Head of Markets Innovation Group at A&O said “I have been at the forefront of legal tech for 15 years but I have never seen anything like Harvey. It is a game-changer that can unleash the power of generative AI to transform the legal industry. Harvey can work in multiple languages and across diverse practice areas, delivering unprecedented efficiency and intelligence. In our trial, we saw some amazing results.”

People prefer talking to a human in troubled situations, which makes sense because it’s challenging to empathize with a machine.

However, I’m not sure that will always be the case, and I think it’s very likely we will be much more comfortable talking with machines and having them help with our problems in the next decade or so. This would severely limit the overall utility of a human attorney in the future, and because of that, I couldn’t sign my life away for the next three years.