Scottish Legal Review: Real legal life and artificial intelligence

The legal market is never satisfied. Revenues rose by 10 per cent last year? Next year, let’s do 15 per cent. Got the second-best litigation team in Scotland? Make it number one. Conquered the globe with the exception of the US? Crash America. These are kinds of thoughts that permeate boardrooms in both Fountainbridge and the City of London.

America is the last meaningful battlefield that British firms are yet to conquer. Pinsent Masons, CMS, Addleshaw Goddard, and Dentons are familiar names in Edinburgh, and are also seen throughout Europe and Asia. Ask about them on Wall Street, though, and you may be met with blank faces. Hence why one of the best British-headquartered firms, Allen & Overy, decided that it was tired of making slow, gradual inroads into the US and sped up its expansion by merging with Shearman & Sterling. Thus A&O Shearman was born, representing one of the largest law firm mergers in the last few decades, and easily the most significant to the UK since Clifford Chance merged with Rogers & Wells in 1999.

Al Marsh, UK research director at Chambers and Partners | Chambers and Partners

Shearman & Sterling weren’t quite the Celtic of American law, but they were a solid Motherwell, and having access to a recognisable brand is not a bad thing in a market as cut-throat as K Street in Washington DC. Just remember that bigger doesn’t always mean, er, bigger. Not long after the merger, the firm announced that it would trim its global partnership by 10 per cent, close its consultancy business and shut its Johannesburg office.

Closer to home, the merger of Morton Fraser and MacRoberts went through smoothly last November. According to Chambers, it is going well – the new Morton Fraser MacRoberts has the fifth-most ranked departments in Scotland, after Brodies in top spot, followed by Burness Paull, Harper Macleod and Anderson Strathern.

Brodies demonstrated recently that international expansion is something it is not afraid of, as it launched an Abu Dhabi office in May, primarily to build up its energy practice in the Middle East.

Chambers collects information about market trends. It is relatively straightforward, given that the researchers on our UK guides this year racked up around 15,000 telephone interviews and backed this up with some 45,000 client surveys. The topic of the hour is, of course, artificial intelligence. Any law firm worth its salt will already be using AI software in some shape or form. You may well use something similar yourself in the form of Copilot.

AI is perfect a perfect match for the legal profession – most lawyers sift through hundreds of rather dry documents every day. Some of their tasks will require commerciality and creativity that only a human can provide. Others, to be frank, are dull and could be performed by an intelligent machine.

When I attended the annual conference of the Association of Corporate Counsel in Edinburgh in May, I had many interesting conversations. The most interesting was with a helpful barman trying to convince my colleague that he was “too English” to want a pint of Tennent’s Lager so he should try ordering something else. The rest, however, were all about AI.

I suspect that there will not be a legal practice area of “AI law” in the same way that there isn’t really a practice of “internet law”. Just as the internet is, essentially, everything, AI also has too many tentacles to be able to control.

Leading general counsel told me that AI concerns infiltrate every practice area – from data protection to media, and from life sciences to employment.

Intellectual property is a classic example. You may have experienced the horror of attempting to buy a celebrity biography on Amazon only to realise at the last minute that you’ve paid for a knockoff copy of AI-generated garbage.

This is a classic case of “passing off”, and such incidents are likely to skyrocket as AI improves and enters the worlds of film, music and video games.

And don’t forget that AI is as biased as the humans who programme it, and the material it learns from. There have been instances of AI chatbots using racist language. If you’re a recruiter and you’re using AI to screen CVs then you better be sure that your software isn’t favouring white candidates, for example.

Having said all that, the first notable AI case has in fact brought a victory for the new technology – the Information Commissioner Office’s investigation into Snapchat held that its “My AI” tool did not breach UK general data protection regulation (GDPR) rules.

Scottish clients told our research team that they are “enjoying” lukewarm optimism regarding the long-awaited decline in interest rates, which could lead to gently increased activity in the property sector. However, Scotland may not be the best place for you if your contract becomes problematic, as the backlog in the courts is a serious cause for concern.

If any Prime Minister were to have an interest in reversing court underfunding, it would be one who is a former Director of Public Prosecutions. But, we’ve already seen from the Budget that the UK Government feels that it has little financial wiggleroom, so the queues at The High Court of Justiciary may continue to grow.