The AI Legal Impacts All Lawyers Should Know

Episode Notes

Transcript

Molly Ranns :

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the State Bar of Michigan’s On Balance Podcast on Legal Talk Network. I’m Molly Ranns.

JoAnn Hathaway:

And I’m JoAnn Hathaway. We are very pleased to have Sateesh Nori join us today as our podcast guest talking about how AI is impacting the legal profession. Sateesh is a lawyer, professor, senior nonprofit executive legal strategist, a BA legal rebel, and author of the publication Sheltered 20 Years in Housing Court. And with that, Sateesh, I’m going to turn the mic over to you so you can share some more information about yourself with our listeners.

Sateesh Nori:

Thank you so much, JoAnn. It’s really a pleasure to be here. I am Sateesh Nori, and I can be found on LinkedIn, and my email address is sn352@nyu.edu. And I really look forward to hearing from you.

Molly Ranns :

Sateesh, let’s start with a question regarding ai, which everybody seems to be talking about these days. Can you talk about how AI is currently being used in legal practice and what some of the most promising applications are that you’ve seen?

Sateesh Nori:

Absolutely. Thanks, Molly. There’s two things going on with AI in the legal field right now. On the one hand you have this explosion of apps and services and products. Everybody is selling everything it seems. And on the other hand, you have people who are completely in the dark about ai. They have fears, they have apprehensions. They worry that the AI is going to make a mistake and they’re going to be embarrassed that it’s going to hallucinate, that it’s going to violate their client confidentiality and so on and so on. The firsthand, these companies exist that we already know. Open AI is invested in by Microsoft. Then you have Microsoft itself, which has AI tools called copilot, and you have Google and Google’s invested in a company called Anthropic, which makes a product called Claude. And then you have these new legal AI companies. Some companies I’ve worked with are La Droid and Joseph, but you have some big new players like Harvey, which is already worth billions of dollars in terms of what they’ve raised.

So it’s the wild west out there in terms of ai. And for the average lawyer or legal services attorney, they really need to think about what they need before they go out and buy things that they don’t need. And so the best way to think about AI in the legal field is first identify your pain points. What are the things that you work on every single day that are tedious, that are repetitive, that are mind numbing, that are kind of dehumanizing? And see if you can apply one of these existing tools to that problem. And then you can see if your time is freed up, if you’re able to think about the bigger problems, go deeper into some of the legal issues and so on.

JoAnn Hathaway:

So I always find it fascinating to hear about how AI is transforming the legal profession and also with so many rapid advancements, I’m not surprised that it’s sparking. I would say both some excitement and some concern. I think we’ve all heard some lawyers fear that it could replace them all together while others see it as a tool just to enhance their work as you were just talking about. So where do you fall on that spectrum? And also Sateesh, what do you see as the realistic impact of AI on legal jobs in the coming years?

Sateesh Nori:

Such a great question, JoAnn. Well, I like to start at the beginning and I think most lawyers should start there too. And the question is, why did you become a lawyer? What was it that you thought lawyers did when you were younger and you were thinking about your career? When I was younger, I thought lawyers were the good guys. They stuck up for the marginalized, the people without a voice. I thought lawyers went to court and they argued before judges who were looking for the truth. I thought lawyers were trying to make our society better, whether domestically or internationally, they were trying to fight for human rights and the rights of everyone to live with dignity. And if I think about the law that way, and I fast forward to what I actually do every day as a legal services lawyer, it’s somewhat depressing. So most of my time these days, and for the past 22 years that I’ve been doing this are spent doing paperwork or answering phone calls and directing people to other places for help and filling out forms and writing the same legal motion over and over again or calling the same government agency over and over again.

These things are so draining and demoralizing because most of the time I’m spending is wasted. I’m not productive, I’m not actually helping anyone, and most of my time is being sucked away by these mundane rote tasks. So does AI kind of take these over? Are people going to become obsolete in these professions? No, I think going back to the origins of what lawyers are supposed to do, we should be counseling our, we should be explaining the law to them. We should be in court arguing the difficult cases. We should be pushing the limits of the law in those cases where there isn’t a clear answer. And that’s more interesting work, that’s more fulfilling work, and I think we’ll be able to help people in a much more deep and meaningful way. The other way to look at it is we are already robots right now, so why are we afraid of automation?

As I described earlier, so much of what we do is robotic repetitive work. So why not let the actual robots do that work and free us up to do the human work that only we can do? But the final part of this question is, well, what happens to all those lawyers out there? One sad truth might be that there are too many lawyers out there and they’re not doing the work that lawyers should be doing anyway. There’s over 1.3 million lawyers in America, and yet 92% of American civil legal justice problems are going unaddressed. So what are all those lawyers doing? They should be deployed into doing this type of work. And maybe AI can do some of that work and make some of those legal jobs obsolete, but we maybe don’t need those jobs anyway. Do we need another person reviewing a contract between two corporations and charging a ton of money for it? Maybe not, but do we need more people representing people on the brink of eviction or people who are denied their benefits or people working in government agencies that are keeping us safe or educated or making sure our highways and roads are safe, things like that. So it’s definitely going to be a new paradigm, and that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept, especially some of the lawyers. But I think hopefully we can use AI properly and make our society better as a result, make our profession better too.

Molly Ranns :

Sateesh, you just alluded to something that I want to touch on, and that is the idea of access to justice. I do think AI has the potential to truly enhance access to justice, particularly for underserved communities. How can legal tech and AI tools be leveraged to bridge that justice gap that we’ve all been hearing so much about?

Sateesh Nori:

Yeah, it’s such a great question, Molly. There’s this thing that dominates legal work and it’s called the billable hour. And so lawyers spend X number of hours on a matter doing legal research or drafting something, and they charge their client X times Y, which is their billable rate. And that’s the way, not only corporate law works, but also nonprofits. They’re kind of built on that model of how many hours does it take and how much do we bill? And in nonprofits, it’s not about billing the client, but it’s often about building the funder, the state or local agency or the foundation for that work. And so what AI is going to do is make the billable hour obsolete. It’s going to bring the entire house of cards tumbling down. Why is that? Well, if you take a typical research question in a big complicated corporate legal case, you might spend 20 hours on researching something and assign three or four associates to that project and come up with an answer that you delivered to the client or to the court or use in settlement or something like that.

Well, with some of the legal AI models that we are seeing right now, that 20 hour project will now take five seconds. Five seconds. So what happens to the way that this time is counted? What happens to the way lawyers are paid? What happens to the way funders are billed for this type of work? It all goes out the window. And so corporate law in particular, I think is due for a serious reckoning about how AI is going to change their business model. But on the nonprofit side, the same thing that might kill corporate laws. We know it could save nonprofit law. So we in nonprofits no longer have to worry about the things that I call the how questions, how do we translate a document for a client? How do we help a client fill out paperwork? How do we convey important rights information to clients in our community?

How do we file something in court, right? These are all things that overburden nonprofits, they don’t have enough resources or staff to do these things, but AI can do all of these things easily and cheaply. AI can translate, AI can help people fill out forms. AI can deliver content to people when they need in their language 24 7, 365. And so nonprofit law is going to see this boost from AI in the opposite way that corporate law is going to take a huge hit from ai. And I think that’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

JoAnn Hathaway:

That is so important and great to hear for the underserved. And while AI has the potential to break down barriers in the legal system, I think we’ve all heard that it also brings some concerns. We’ve been talking about that, and particularly when it comes to ethics and regulation. So Sateesh, as AI becomes more integrated into legal practices, how should the profession address some of the biggest ethical and regulatory challenges?

Sateesh Nori:

Yeah, that’s a really important question, JoAnn. The first real challenge to using AI in the nonprofit or access to justice space is the unauthorized practice of law. And this is a barrier that exists in every state and requires that only lawyers can give legal advice. If you’re not a lawyer and you’re giving legal advice to people, you’re breaking the law. And if you study the origins of these rules, two things kind of pop up. Number one, these rules and laws are intended to protect the consumer. So we don’t want nobody untrained to be giving legal advice to people that could be harmful to them, that could be harmful to all of us. But the second reason that pops up is that lawyers as a business wanted to protect their business. It’s protectionism in a sense. It’s not unlike tariffs. And so that second reason is much less about protecting the public or protecting the consumer.

It’s about protecting the business of law. And originally, the business of law was performed by white men. And so there are even darker origins to some of these unauthorized practice of law rules. And the third thing that you notice about these rules is obviously they were written decades and decades ago at a time in which nobody could envision that a technology like AI could exist. And so now that we have AI and we see that AI can reliably provide legal advice to people with 99.9% accuracy, we can see that these concerns about harming people are overstated or maybe they’re irrelevant. Now, I’ve built a tool in New York City called Roxanne AI with the help of a company called Joseph and with a nonprofit called Housing Court Answers. And Roxanne gives tenants in New York City help with repair issues directly. It’s a chat bot and it uses what’s called retrieval augmented generation.

So it derives its knowledge from a a defined set of information that I created. And that way we can make sure that it doesn’t hallucinate, it doesn’t mislead people, it doesn’t give people incorrect information. And so far, we launched Roxanne on January 7th, 2025, and it’s been used over a thousand times. And the potential for a tool like Roxanne is immense. Roxanne can translate information into any language, it can answer questions at any reading level or level of understanding. It works, again 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And it really challenges some of these regulations, these unauthorized practice of law rules because it does what I call actionable legal information. The traditional dichotomy was legal advice, which is illegal for non-lawyers and legal information, which is legal to give. And so many of us would give only legal information if we’re not acting as lawyers.

And that’s not fulfilling. That’s not useful enough for the average person. They want to know what they should do to protect themselves, to assert their rights. And so this new category, actionable legal information, I think really is going to open up the space and hopefully some of these unnecessary regulations will go away. Now, there’s a whole other side of this question, which is is it ethical for lawyers to use ai? And in many places, courts, judges, law schools, law firms are either banning AI or requiring disclosure the use of ai. And I think all of these ideas are kind of misplaced. AI is just a tool. You wouldn’t disclose that you used Westlaw rather than go to the law library, you wouldn’t disclose that you used a calculator to add up the numbers in a personal injury lawsuit. You wouldn’t disclose that you used spellcheck before you submitted a legal brief to a court. And so why would you disclose that you used ai? It’s just a tool. It’s a support. And as long as you check it, which you have an ethical duty to do anyway, right? You have a duty of competence that already exists in the ethical rules. There’s nothing extra that’s needed when you’re dealing with ai. So this is some of the stuff that’s really kind of bubbling up in the regulatory atmosphere of ai.

Molly Ranns :

Thank you so much, Sateesh. We are now going to take a very short break from our conversation with Sateesh Nori to thank our sponsors.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Welcome back. We are thrilled to be here today with Sateesh Nori talking about how AI is impacting the legal

Molly Ranns :

Profession. So Sateesh, as a clinician who has specialized in working with legal professionals for the last decade and a half, I have to ask the question regarding wellbeing. And so I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how the integration of tools in legal practice can alleviate the workload and the stress experienced by lawyers. And even beyond that, what measures should be taken to ensure that these technologies support mental health and help to achieve that work-life balance that so many attorneys are concerned with?

Sateesh Nori:

Yeah, that’s such an important consideration. And so as I described earlier, lawyers mostly are doing mind numbing, repetitive work, and it’s demoralizing and it’s really time consuming. And so even things like writing letters of recommendation or writing clients letters to remind them about an upcoming court date or advocating for someone through a government agency and a bureaucracy that is just time consuming to deal with all of these things drain our time and energy, and they add up. Sometimes we think, oh, it’s just another five minutes of work. I’ll be home shortly. Or it’s just this last email that I have to send. It shouldn’t take much time, but if we add up all the time we spend doing that, just one more thing. It adds up to hours and hours a day, maybe tens of hours a week, and that’s time away from our hobbies, our family, our mental health.

Sometimes we just need a break. And working as lawyers can seem relentless. The paperwork never stops. The demands on our time never end the emails, the phone calls, the demands from judges and opposing counsel. And so what can AI do? It deals with all of that housed and allows us to focus on the what stuff. And that can be really freeing. That can be really liberating for a lawyer. In my own practice, I’ve seen people burnout because not that the work is stressful, but because it’s so tedious, it takes up so much time and sometimes it can feel so efficient and ineffective. AI can do that. So how can it do that? Well, AI can answer emails. AI can draft first drafts of letters, even legal memoranda. AI can deal with scheduling. When you’re dealing with multiple parties and you have to pick a date for a meeting or a conference call, AI can help you do that.

AI can help you do legal research and identify cases in a natural language way with context that you couldn’t do before, and then transform that type of content into a presentable first draft that you can then work with. AI can translate documents. AI can explain things to people. You get a complicated legal decision from a judge. First you want to understand what it says. You can use AI for that. Next, you want to explain it to your client. Again, AI can do that. And thirdly, maybe you want to translate that into your client’s language. Well, then AI of course can do that very easily. So when we talk about the mental health crisis, and it is a crisis that lawyers are facing in New York City, anecdotally I’ve heard that there is a legal services lawyer quitting their job every week of every month of every year, and sometimes they’re quitting without having another job lined up.

And that tells you how burnt out they are, how tired and drained they must feel if they’re leaving their job for nothing, they’d rather be unemployed than have a job doing this type of work. Well, that’s really sad because there’s so many people who count on us to work in these jobs to help. And so if we can take all of this draining work off of our plates and we can focus on the interesting stuff, which by the way also has a greater impact on our client’s lives, the deeper level work, that’s where we kind of win or lose our cases. It’s not the phone calls and the emails that are going to win us the cases. It’s that deeper level analysis that negotiating, that counseling that we provide to our clients. So I think in a weird way, the robots will help us find our humanity. They’ll help us be more human as lawyers and do less of the robotic work that we’re doing right now.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Well, that is very reassuring to hear that AI can actually help reduce stress and workloads both at the same time. I guess they kind of go hand in hand. As AI becomes a bigger part of the profession, it also changes what it means to be a great lawyer. So looking ahead, what skills do you believe future lawyers will need to succeed in a profession that is increasingly shaped by both AI and automation?

Sateesh Nori:

Yeah, that’s a really important question. And I think first we have to look to the law schools and really implore them to start talking about ai, to start seeing that there’s tidal wave coming that’s going to wipe out a significant part of the legal profession and that they have to start teaching their law students how to be prepared for it, how to start building those boats so they can float above these waves and survive. Otherwise they’re going to be drowned. And law schools are not doing that at this point. So that’s the first step. The second step is law students need to be able to work with these tools and there’s no time like the present, and many of these tools are available for free. You can get chat g, PT or Claude, Google Gemini already exists if you have a Gmail account and so on.

So start practicing, start using these tools and figuring out how they can work into your life and your work, and that will prepare you for the way that most of us are going to be working probably in a year, if not sooner than that. The third thing is build up those skills that AI cannot fill in. So build up those skills of speaking, public speaking and counseling and negotiating and oral argument, all the things that we already think lawyers do anyway. When you see a lawyer on TV or in a book, they’re not doing paperwork in a cubicle that would be boring. They’re standing up in court and giving a dramatic speech to vindicate someone’s rights. Think like to kill a Mockingbird. Well, those are the skills that you should practice because AI can’t do that stuff. You can do it and your clients need you to do that stuff because the robots will do the easy stuff.

And so law students, maybe it requires a different type of person who will now think about going to law school, someone who might think I can do that. I can talk to people, I can advocate, I can be persuasive, I can be creative. I can write well beyond the basic standard that AI can already offer. And I think those are the skills that we’re going to need to develop. And first step is the law schools. They have to start working on these skills, teaching these skills, stressing these skills. Otherwise they’re not preparing their students for what is to come.

Molly Ranns :

I think that’s a really interesting answer and viewpoint, Sateesh, I guess lecture in all five of Michigan’s law schools multiple times per year, and there’s such a difference in such variation between how different professors approach ai. I’ve seen some really supportive of it and talking about it and others not allowing it. It’s interesting as you talk about that really it sounds like everybody needs to be on the same page. I even see that in my son’s middle school. Some teachers in classes encourage use of ai, whereas others prohibit it. So I think we’re coming to a space where everybody really needs to get on the same page with how are we going to approach this. So your answer makes a lot of sense. If you could set one key policy, I guess, or guideline for how AI should be integrated into legal practice, can you help our listeners understand what that would be and perhaps why?

Sateesh Nori:

That’s a really, really great question. What do we do with this thing? How do we talk about it? How do we integrate it? Do we fear it? And I think the first step is to not think of it as some new extra thing. This is something that’s already existed for decades. Many of us use AI all the time. One of the examples I gave earlier is spellcheck. Everyone uses spellcheck all the time. And if you didn’t use spellcheck and you turn something into a court and it contains mistakes, everyone would say to you, why didn’t you use spellcheck? It already exists. It’s on your computer. That’s a mistake. AI is the same way. It’s technology that has existed for decades. In fact, the origins of AI come from the mechanical check hard loom, which was invented in 200 years ago. And what the mechanical loom did is it replicated patterns in textiles.

And that pattern replication was thought initially to be ungodly. It was thought to be magic. And now what we see is computers can recognize patterns. That’s what large language models do, and they do it so well because the computing power we have today is so much stronger than it was even five or 10 years ago. So that’s really the basis of most of the AI that we as lawyers engage with is pattern recognition. So why are we afraid of it? So if we can overcome that fear and say, these are just tools. They’ve always existed. They’re just stronger now. They’re sharper, now, they can do more now and let’s integrate them into our existing work and let’s eliminate the work that we don’t need to do anymore. It’s like learning how to ride a bicycle. The bicycle gets you from A to B faster, and you might need to spend a little time going from walking to learning how to ride a bike, but once you figure it out, there’s no going back.

You’re never going to walk, which takes 10 times as long once you have a bicycle that works and you can take it to where you’re going. So it’s a mindset change. It really requires some adaptation that unfortunately lawyers are terrible at lawyers don’t adapt well, they’re not good at innovating. In fact, most lawyers are lawyers because they’re risk averse. They don’t want to take chances. They want everything to be certain, and that’s why it’s going to be a little bit harder to integrate AI into the legal work. So what’s the one thing I would say is like, don’t think of this thing as something new or something different. It is already woven through our lives, and we just have to see those trends and figure out how to weave them together in new ways to make our lives a little bit easier, to make our work more productive and to give us more free time to do the other things that we want to do.

JoAnn Hathaway:

I think this podcast has made it apparent how establishing the right policies now is key to AI’s responsible growth in the legal industry. And speaking of shaping the future of law, Sateesh, we are excited that you’ll be joining us as keynote speaker at the state bar of Michigan’s Great Lakes legal conference this summer from June 12th through the 14th on Macada Island. And also, I understand you’ll be presenting a separate session as well. What are you most looking forward to experiencing at the conference? Why should our listeners mark their calendars and even further, can you provide a preview for our listeners of what you will address?

Sateesh Nori:

Yeah, thank you. Well, first of all, I’m really excited to go to Mackinac Island. I’ve never been there and I’ve been looking at pictures and reading accounts, and it seems like a magical, really incredible place to be. So I’m really, really excited to be there. Second, in my keynote, I’m hoping to address a lot of these issues that we talked about today, and those are issues that are really going to shape the future of legal practice. And there are things that I think everyone is going to want to know because these are the ways that we’re going to work. This is the way that everything we do is going to change. So for example, what should law schools do? How should law firms adapt? How should we train people? How should we onboard people? How should we talk about internships and how should we talk about the client services that we offer?

Other issues are things like, how do we bring change into our law firms? How do we get the decision makers within legal services and within our funders to think about these things in new ways? That’s going to be a real challenge. People, like I said, lawyers are not ready to embrace change the same way that they probably should be, and that means that we need to do some work. We need to figure out how we can talk about these issues, how we can ease the transition and the stress, how we can guarantee or at least reassure people that AI isn’t coming for your jobs, but AI can help you do your job better. It can help you be more efficient. It can help you have a greater impact in what you’re doing. It can help your organization do more with less funding, or at least reallocate funding to increase your impact and mission.

These are all excellent things that can really transform the way that we meet the access to justice gap. Other things that I hope to discuss are how AI can help us be more specialized. There could be a vision of the future in which there are more law firms that are smaller, more nimble and more specialized, more legal nonprofits. There could be no lawyer nonprofits that are delivering content to people in a way that helps them. AI can actually help to democratize the law, can help us fill the vision of equal access to the law, which right now, in some ways, the lawyers are in the way of right. Lawyers have set up these barriers, these rules, and they claim that they’re the only ones who can navigate someone forward through a legal maze. Well, the original intent was probably that everyone should have access to the law. We all own the law. It’s ours, and we should be able to navigate it without barriers. AI hopefully can help to do that. These are some of the issues that I hope to tackle. I hope to see all of you there and engage with you in person.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Well, that sounds like a wonderful keynote. We have come to the end of our show and we would like to thank our guest today, Sateesh Nori, for a wonderful program.

Sateesh Nori:

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Molly Ranns :

Sateesh has already provided his contact information at the beginning of the podcast, and he did encourage all of you to reach out to him. I know Sateesh, I’m looking forward to meeting you personally on Mackinac Island this summer. I will also be at the Great Lakes Legal Conference doing a presentation speaking. So I look forward to touching base then, and we just want to thank you again for joining us.

Sateesh Nori:

Thank you so much. It was really such a pleasure.

Molly Ranns :

This has been another edition of the State Bar of Michigan On Balance Podcast. I’m JoAnn Hathaway. And I’m Molly Rands. Until next time. Thank you for listening.

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