Australia’s biggest law firm, MinterEllison, is using a version of ChatGPT for its first draft of some legal advice

Australia’s biggest law firm Minter­Ellison has begun using an in-house advice generator, in the most widespread expansion yet of the technology in the nation’s legal system.

MinterEllison CEO Virginia Briggs. Picture: John Feder

Australia’s biggest law firm Minter­Ellison is using artificial intelligence to write the first draft of some of its legal advice, in the most widespread expansion yet of the technology in the nation’s legal system.

MinterEllison said its environment and planning division in the past few weeks had been using an in-house advice generator created on the back of one of OpenAI’s large language models, akin to a customised and specialised version of ChatGPT.

Law firms have been integrating AI into more of their operations, but MinterEllison execu­tives said they believed their model was the first in the country able to aid specifically in the issuance of legal advice.

This comes after former Federal Court chief justice James Allsop warned against the use of AI in courtrooms, saying the law could not be applied properly without “human feeling”.

In a presentation at Microsoft’s Sydney office on Friday, MinterEllison executives said the firm’s partners reported the chatbot’s outputs were “80 per cent of the way there” and were on par with what a graduate lawyer could produce.

The tool is a specially tuned instance of GPT-4, the large language model behind the paid version of ChatGPT, and is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. Microsoft is the largest backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

“We’re pretty proud of it,” said chief technology officer Gary Adler. “It’s only a very early iteration, but it’s already being used in production.

“I’m paraphrasing a quote from the partner rather than my own language … what used to take roughly two hours to produce and using different groups of resources at the junior level, now takes about 30 seconds.”

MinterEllison chief executive Virginia Briggs said AI could cut out the “drudgery” of legal work often performed by junior lawyers, which raised new challenges in training those juniors.

“For the portion of training that we have historically done and we still do – that we do by getting them to do by doing discovery, or doing due diligence … that will change,” she told The Australian.

“But we don’t pretend we’ve nailed that or we know what that will look like. We’ve got to work out how we do that training because they won’t be doing that type of work. We don’t know what that will look like yet.”

Ms Briggs said she thought clients would soon demand generative AI integration in legal work.

“We think we will very quickly get to the point where for our clients, who are also at the leading edge of this journey, they will say to us, we want you to use generative AI in how you produce your work because we want to see those efficiencies and we want to see the value creation.”

Mr Adler added certain sectors had already started applying this kind of pressure. “I have spoken to a couple of clients in the tech space – so they’re more on the leading edge – and their view has been they will be looking at their panel firms over the next 12 months and if they are not using these technologies, they’ll be asking why,” he said.

“They want to see their work produced in the most effective way and they want to see the lawyers from their panel firms working on more complex elements of the matter.”

“We may stop pricing in terms of time and start pricing in terms of value,” Ms Briggs said. “I think that shift is coming very quickly.”