Theoretical swimmers don’t win Olympic competitions. Studying and discussing swimming styles doesn’t prepare a swimmer to compete. Champion swimmers must dive into the water and practice, building endurance and refining their techniques daily.
For lawyers who must oversee the use of AI in their organizations and legal practices, success requires the same hands-on, immersive approach. In highlighting the importance of immersion, persistence, and practical learning below, I shed light on how lawyers can master the skills and techniques to better engage with and oversee the evolving world of AI.
Hands-On Learning For More Effective AI Oversight
Through continuous oversight, lawyers address AI systems’ potential risks, biases, and ethical concerns while protecting individual rights, promoting fairness, and ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
Just as swimmers can’t succeed by merely understanding aquatics principles, lawyers can’t optimize AI’s full potential without immersing themselves in its practical applications. Actively engaging in deploying and using AI tools for daily tasks teaches you about their actual functions, limitations, and potential.
Much of the information online is hype and speculation. Firsthand knowledge of how AI technologies function in real-world scenarios increases your ability to evaluate actual potential business impacts. Immersion provides the space for lived experience, helping you more deeply understand the cause-and-effect relationships in AI systems and empowering you to:
- Establish appropriate guidelines and policies for when and how employees should use various AI applications.
- Discover the legal and business tasks most suitable for automation.
- Observe the performance of AI tools across various workflows to determine whether they are more efficient than traditional methods.
- Easily detect potential issues and take measures to prevent misuse.
Like an Olympic swimmer who must attend daily training sessions to ensure peak physical and technical abilities, your persistence in learning through AI tools strengthens your competencies. It prepares you for the complex challenges ahead.
Refine Oversight Strategies Through Iterative Learning
Reading books and articles on AI expands your knowledge base, but only through immersion can you enhance your experience level. When crafting AI oversight programs, your firsthand experiences form the foundation for the subsequent introspection, evaluation, and execution stages.
Dive into projects that involve AI’s practical application, identify improvement areas, and refine your oversight strategies through the iterative learning process. Ultimately, the legal oversight function will maximize AI benefits for clients, leading to more accurate and comprehensive legal analyses for more data-driven decision-making and improved legal outcomes.
There will be moments of triumph, with breakthroughs akin to coding mastery and challenging periods when AI implementation stumbles. Embracing these fluctuations helps you build resilience and competence, while your experiential knowledge empowers you to overcome inevitable challenges.
Swimmers often push their limits to strive for record-breaking achievements. You can likewise target ambitious initiatives that create meaningful change and implement AI technologies that enhance the overall impact of your legal services. Committing to hands-on experimentation and overcoming setbacks will spur personal and professional growth, leading to greater AI implementation success.
What AI-related initiatives do you want to pursue? How will you measure your progress? What AI-related learning can you apply to your next endeavor?
Olga V. Mack is the VP at LexisNexis and CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat, Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, and Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities. She is working on Visual IQ for Lawyers, her next book (ABA 2023). You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.
