The generative AI tools that the firm has invested in are Casetext's CoCounsel, owned by Thomson Reuters; Microsoft's Copilot; and a custom-built tool called Prompt Composer that leverages Anthropic's large language model Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4o model.
Blake Rooney, chief information officer at Husch Blackwell, told Law360 Pulse on Friday that the biggest benefit of implementing AI tools for the firm was that it reduced the amount of time attorneys and staffers have to spend on mundane tasks like reviewing thousands of documents.
"The ability to use artificial intelligence to summarize those documents and understand which ones are the most important, the ones that we need to focus on first — nobody was dying to do that sort of work, so the ability to displace those sort of things and put our lawyers in a place to do higher-order work that's more fulfilling, and it's better for our clients, is important," he said.
Jamie Lawless, chief executive at Husch Blackwell, added, "We've seen benefits including strengthened relationships with our clients as we engage with them on these topics; quicker turnaround on client work, which, of course, results in client satisfaction; and hopefully, and ultimately, client loyalty."
Since developer OpenAI LLC released its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, several legal tech companies and law firms have released their own tools leveraging the technology.
Some of the generative AI tools being offered by legal tech companies include Casetext's CoCounsel, CS Disco's Cecilia, ContractPodAi's Leah, Logikcull's Logikbot AI, LawDroid Copilot and Relativity's aiR for Review. CoCounsel can review documents, prepare a deposition and analyze a contract; aiR for Review can predict whether data is relevant to a discovery request.
Law firms that have built their own generative AI tools include Hogan Lovells, Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian LLP, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP and Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP.
Husch Blackwell rolled out CoCounsel to all of its attorneys in June 2023, according to Rooney. The firm also joined the early adopters program for Microsoft's Copilot last summer and plans to give all of its attorneys, staff members and paralegals access to the tool by the end of the month.
In February, the firm gave all of its employees access to its custom-built generative AI tool, Prompt Composer, Rooney said. The firm has more than 1,000 attorneys and nearly 1,200 staff members and paralegals.
Attorneys and staff can use Prompt Composer to more quickly search data by uploading a set of information and asking the tool questions about the information, according to Rooney. One of the firm's goals is to create a prompt library for the tool, so people can reuse or tweak prompts that have been used before.
In the first quarter of 2024, the firm displaced about 6,000 attorney hours using AI tools, according to Rooney.
Before attorneys and staff can use these tools, they must agree to Husch Blackwell's generative AI policy, Rooney said. The firm also highly recommends that they complete one-hour training sessions for each of the tools.
All the firm's training sessions emphasize the importance of verifying outputs from generative AI tools and how these types of tools have the tendency to "hallucinate," or provide false information, according to Rooney.
In addition to the recommended training, the firm offers attorneys and staffers optional lunch and learn sessions to help them get better at using AI tools or one-on-one sessions with the firm's AI solutions strategist, Rooney said.
Attorneys are allowed to use generative AI tools on legal work if they have clients' permission, according to Lawless.
She said some clients want lawyers to use generative AI tools in their cases and others don't.
Lawless noted that having conversations with clients about how the firm uses generative AI tools and will protect their information helps alleviate their fears about the technology.
"Typically, once that conversation takes place, they're more open to us leveraging that technology," she said.
Rooney said the most challenging part about investing in AI solutions was getting attorneys and staffers to use the tools.
"There's a subset of people who look at new technology and want to exploit it immediately, and then other ones, who I think would get a lot of utility out of it, they're used to doing things in a particular way," he said.
In light of the firm's deployment of generative AI tools, Husch Blackwell anticipates that alternative fee arrangements will make up a larger percentage of its business in the near future, according to Lawless.
"Our goal is to drive value for our clients through tools such as AI, so that they share in that benefit, and AFAs allow you to do that in creative and typically more cost-effective ways for the client," she said.
--Editing by Karin Roberts.
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