Legal Ops Need to Establish Clear Rules for Using GenAI

As Legal Ops starts incorporating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into its tech stack to boost efficiency and productivity within legal departments, it also needs to establish rules for using GenAI in the workplace to reduce risk. Here are some of these rules, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal:

• Be wary of bias. GenAI models can reflect biases in the data sets and information they are trained on. Legal Ops can implement a process where anything produced with the help of GenAI is carefully examined. Exercising human judgment on AI-generated material can help alleviate some of the risk of biases.
• Don’t share sensitive business information. Most GenAI programs store conversations and use the data to train their models. This can result in the increased risk that information can re-emerge in someone else’s search. Examples of information that could be exposed this way include computer code, transcripts of company meetings, or email exchanges.
• Be careful in choosing an AI program. Legal Ops should consider so-called enterprise-grade models, which are paid subscriptions for businesses that offer more security for business data. When choosing a GenAI program, be sure you fully understand how data input into the programs will be stored and who will have access to that data.
• Don’t fully trust AI results to be accurate. Be wary of GenAI “hallucinations,” responses generated by AI that include false or inaccurate information. Hallucinations can sometimes look legitimate enough to go undetected. Checking where the information is coming from before using AI-generated content can help reduce inaccuracies.

Arun Chandrasekaran, an AI analyst with Gartner, suggests that companies negotiate their own contracts with GenAI vendors. This ensures that the AI is only trained on a database the company has provided, so that no potentially inaccurate outside information is introduced. Some companies have also turned to developing their own proprietary programs, he said.