Lawyers in Hong Kong recently took on an ‘AI Skills Challenge’ to discover the practical ways professional-grade AI could help them at work.
Thomson Reuters invited legal professionals to test CoCounsel in a set of work-based challenges. The following article shares observations from the participants and compares the professional-grade AI assistant to manual processes.
How fast did CoCounsel perform in the AI Skills Challenge?
CoCounsel, the professional-grade AI assistant, performed at superhuman speed during the AI skills challenge in Hong Kong.
The AI Skills Challenge participants from the Hong Kong legal profession ran a series of tests. They compared CoCounsel’s real-time capabilities with how a lawyer would normally undertake the same task.
Edward Tsim, Regional Legal Counsel at GoGoX, said what sets CoCounsel apart is its AI skills. Using certain legally specific skills to perform tasks can be time intensive and repetitive.
CoCounsel synthesises dozens of legal documents using generative AI. A human tackling the same task would take hours, rather than minutes to complete it.
“It very quickly was able to go through a lot of documentation at incredible speed and we get
to choose the outputs we need. There’s a lot of skills which will help me in my day-to-day work as an in-house counsel,” Edward said.
Lawrence Ho, Senior Associate at MinterEllison LLP, said that the tool frees up time for more strategic work.
“It will help me focus more of my time on doing value adding work, more strategic work, and I can assign a lot of the tasks to CoCounsel.”
“I would suggest law firms consider using it,” Lawrence added.
Athena Ang, Head of Legal at HKTV Mall, was another active participant in the AI Skills Challenge. She observed that CoCounsel can save time and resources for the organisation’s operations.
“It helps to reduce a lot of mundane work which, if not for CoCounsel, I would need to employ a lot of junior staff to do day-in and day-out jobs,” Anthea said.
The AI Skills Challenge participants in Hong Kong also noted the intuitive user experience of navigating CoCounsel.
Quick legal summaries speed up workflows
Professional-grade AI can handle large volumes of data and unlock time. CoCounsel’s unique value proposition is the legal skills within the large language model.
Professor Alexander Loke, at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong appreciates the features of the platform.
“I like the organisation, how it has bullet points, and the way it summarised the information, so that I could edit the information further.”
“What impressed me the most was the summary that can create a response or an e-mail to your clients or to your boss,” Professor Loke added.
‘Summarize skill’ compares court decisions
Jamie Cheung, Senior Associate, Deacons enjoys using CoCounsel’s ‘summarize skill’. The feature within CoCounsel can support her by comparing decisions of each case, in her day-to-day work.
“If it was my first day using CoCounsel, I would probably ask it to summarise a bunch of cases and format them into a table format,” Jamie said.
Checking legal work for inaccuracies
During the AI Skills Challenge, lawyers checked the output of the challenges for inaccuracies. The annotated features within the platform enabled them to check legal work with ease.
“I really enjoyed the feature where every bit of information it [CoCounsel] pulls, it gives you the source,” said Katie Lilley, Senior Associate, Litigation at Harneys.
“So I can then go back and check the source, and not just rely on it [CoCounsel], having done it [the work] correctly.”
Legal information you can trust
The unofficial use of AI can be a problem within law firms and legal teams. Legal leaders must provide their teams with appropriate access to responsible AI. Unauthorised usage of AI can increase the risk of data breaches and lead to unintended consequences.
The legal community perceives AI as a tool to support internal efficiencies and client deliverables. Professional grade AI can help drive more trustworthy and reliable results. Taking part in the AI Skills Challenge encouraged lawyers to think more creatively.
Legal technology has value to offer for all lawyers, no matter what stage they are at in their career. Traditionally, early to mid-career lawyers conduct legal research. GenAI can increase their capacity to provide more in-depth legal services and less time searching databases.
Sunny Ji, Trainee Solicitor at Mayer Brown Asia, believes AI opens up space for learning and skill development.
“If everyone has an AI assistant, juniors can be trained to do [more impactful] things for themselves,” Sunny concluded.
