Microsoft’s Lydia Petrakis and GenAI’s Road to Innovation in the Legal Sector

Gina Rubel, Furia Rubel’s CEO and General Counsel, engaged in a conversation with Lydia Petrakis, Corporate Counsel and Digital Strategist at Microsoft, to discuss the transformative impact of generative AI (GenAI) on the legal sector. Petrakis shared practical use cases for in-house legal teams, emphasizing the technology’s proficiency in text generation, summarization, and answering questions, as presented in the podcast and transcript on Furia Rubel’s On Record PR.  

She described how Microsoft employs generative AI in various aspects of legal work, such as using Copilot for drafting documents, Microsoft Teams for meeting summaries, and Microsoft Q&A to streamline knowledge-sharing within the immigration group. Petrakis said that GenAI also helps in contracting. Microsoft has an AI tool reducing review times by 75%, and GenAI is being used to further reduce that percentage. They are now using GenAI to address regulatory challenges by experimenting with internal frameworks.

Discussing Microsoft’s approach to prioritizing GenAI use cases, Petrakis highlighted the importance of crowd-sourcing input and identified three strategic priority areas: advise (knowledge management), transact (contracting), and comply (regulatory focus). The adoption of GenAI involves dispelling misconceptions, particularly around the necessity for data preparation, collaborative efforts, and cultural transformation/change management.

Petrakis delved into the potential impact of a shift from billable hours to value-based billing. She sees value-based billing as an incentive for corporations to collaborate with law firms in experimenting and innovating, fostering a more dynamic partnership. However, she cautioned that value-based billing alone won’t solve all challenges and emphasized the need for ongoing communication between legal professionals and technical teams.

Rubel summed up the discussion by saying, “This new technology is evolving faster than any of us ever expected. We are on a major road of transformation in the legal industry, and for those firms that don’t embrace it, they’re not going to survive.”