Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to fundamentally reshape society. AI has the potential to make “considerable positive changes” in areas such as healthcare, education, business, as well as the practice of law.

Lawyers are generally a conservative bunch, befitting a profession that rewards preparedness, foresight and respect for precedent. No doubt many enjoyed a laugh at the tale of a personal-injury lawyer, who used the popular generative AI tool: ChatGPT to help prepare a court filing. ChatGPT created a motion including made-up cases, rulings and quotes, which the lawyer filed after the AI tool assured that the “cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases”. They were not.

Lesson learned, a technology-skeptic lawyer might conclude: lets stick to the old way of practicing law. That is the wrong lesson. Blaming AI for an error-filled brief makes no sense. The fault lies with the lawyer who failed to check the motion before filing it, not the tool that helped produce it. It would be a mistake to use the extraordinary advances of AI to minimize the importance of the human element in the practice of law. But it would be just as big a mistake to dismiss the role of AI, which will fundamentally reshape the landscape for all industries including providers and users of legal services.

AI is most effective when it is used to complement human skills, and the people who learn how to leverage this collaboration well will get the most return out of AI tools. Yet adopting AI also raises ethical and legal risks for those sectors of the community using it.

Our panel of experts will discuss how AI is impacting our lives now and, in the future, as well as examine how the technology will interact with, challenge and shape law and society moving forward, focusing on such areas as:

• An overview of AI: where we are today, how we got here, where AI will be in the very near future.
• AI and current implementation in finance, health care, education and the military
• AI and the practice of law with demonstration of AI by legal tech vendor
• AI and legal issues: bias, transparency, ethics and accountability