AI personas are created by taking an interview transcript or written documents from one attorney and feeding that information into a large language model so the model mimics the way the attorney reasons and speaks when answering inquiries.
Leonard Nuara, founding partner at Flatiron Law Group LLP, recently told Law360 Pulse that AI personas are not perfect replicas of attorneys or replacements for them, but they can assist lawyers with certain tasks, like writing a first draft or interviewing a client.
"It will be a tool that we will embrace and love, but we have to recognize that we're still the owner of the future," he said.
Last month, international arbitration law firm Three Crowns LLP and Stanford University's legal technology hub CodeX announced that they are building a cross-examination training platform that uses AI personas of the firm's partners to provide associates with feedback.
Three Crowns is one of several law firms working with CodeX to develop AI personas, including Flatiron Law Group, DLA Piper, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and Seyfarth Shaw LLP.
Megan Ma, associate director of CodeX, said the primary use case for AI personas that CodeX is exploring with law firms is lawyer training.
CodeX creates AI personas of senior attorneys and partners by interviewing individuals for two to five hours about watershed moments, as well as muscle memory or near-automated expertise, and then feeding the interview transcript into an LLM, Ma said. She said that an example of muscle memory or near-automated expertise is a litigator being able to review a legal brief in nine seconds and know how the arguments are going to pan out.
"If a senior partner only has two hours to lend to us, then it's one hour of these memories or war stories and one hour of this automated expertise together," she said.
Flatiron Law Group partnered with CodeX to create DealMentor, a platform for teaching law students and young lawyers about the deal negotiation process, according to Nuara.
Using DealMentor, Nuara said, an associate can ask different AI personas questions to understand the inner workings of deal negotiations. The platform has AI personas for the buyer, the seller and counsel.
"It's really helpful to teach younger lawyers, and that's one of the things that we're trying to address that missing component that everybody's saying, 'Oh, well, AI is going to just take over and write everything for us,' but you have to know how to guide the AI. You can't expect it to do everything. And that's where lawyers are making mistakes is that they're expecting this to be a full person," he said.
Nuara, who earned an undergraduate degree in computer science, said he also created an internal platform for his law firm called DealDriver that leverages AI personas to analyze contracts.
Nuara's company, Deal Operating System, will be releasing a beta version of DealDriver soon to sell to other law firms, he said.
Some contingency law firms like The Simon Law Group are also working with software company Personal AI to create AI personas.
Personal AI, a startup founded in 2020 that is focused on developing AI personas to supplement businesses' workforces, was initially focused on medical and financial professionals, according to Ed Diab, head of the legal business unit at Personal AI.
In 2023, Personal AI announced it raised $7.8 million in seed funding to develop its proprietary personal language model called Generative Grounded Transformer, or GGT-1, that's trained on personal data rather than public information.
Diab, who is an environmental lawyer and an investor and adviser to Personal AI, said he saw how AI personas could be used by lawyers, and Personal AI branched out to law firms about six months ago.
Lawyers can create AI personas on Personal AI's platform with their written documents and audio recordings of their conversations and speeches, Diab said.
"Think of it as SarahGPT or EdGPT … a model that was only trained on your brain, your knowledge," he said.
AI personas can be used to maintain institutional knowledge when partners retire, to remember details from many years ago when preparing for a trial and to give associates access to partners, according to Diab.
Diab added that, with hybrid and remote work, associates have lost opportunities to interact with partners and ask them questions, but AI personas can give associates a chance to learn from partners.
"What would typically happen, though, is you have an associate who maybe comes to you with a question and he or she is going to ask a series of questions to try to figure out the answer to a certain problem. Instead, that associate can now chat with the personas of all the partners in the firm and maybe get input from seven or eight or 10 partners at once … and synthesize sort of the best answer based on what all of these different personas would say and do," he said.
Nuara said that many tasks can be solved with AI and technology without using AI personas, but personas are valuable in instances when a certain person's perspective is needed.
"It's not going to be perfect, but [it can] approximate you and [it can] then become an enhancement for you as your proxy to help you research and find things and communicate and so on and so forth," he said.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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