FREDERICK, Md. (AP) — The Employment Law Center of Maryland has recently adopted an artificial intelligence tool that acts as a legal assistant — a move that an attorney at the center says will help close the gap for access to justice.
The nonprofit law firm has been using the tool — called CoCounsel — for the past few months to complete time-intensive tasks like legal research, drafting documents and contracts and reviewing documents. It’s become an integral part of the day-to-day work, the center’s managing attorney, Joseph Gibson, said.
Gibson said the firm was amazed by CoCounsel’s capabilities.
“Candidly, I think our first reaction involves some expletives because we were blown away by the tool,” Gibson said. “And then we really dug in and started using it.”
Casetext, the legal AI company that developed CoCounsel, says it can do “document review, legal research memos, deposition preparation, and contract analysis in minutes.”
Casetext had the Law Center beta test the tool and give feedback to better develop it, Gibson said.
The company wanted the Law Center to think about the tool from a perspective of access to justice.
The whole purpose of the Law Center is to provide affordable legal counsel for those facing legal employment issues, and the tool helps build on that, Gibson said.
“If it allows lawyers to provide legal assistance to more people at a more affordable level, that’s a good thing,” Gibson said.
The tool uses plain language, making it easier for lawyers to use when they’re looking for relevant information for their cases. Instead of having to use complex search terms riddled with parentheses, dashes and exclamation marks to find a case, lawyers can ask CoCounsel to find the case for them.
Gibson said he could see a future in which the average person can use the tool to better understand the law.
“What that means for me is it’s going to be more accessible to other people,” Gibson said. “Lawyers spend a lot of their time translating the law into language that is accessible to your normal person walking down the street and this tool helps us do that.”
Another example of the tool’s abilities is searching through pay stubs.
Instead of spending hours combing through over 1,000 pay stubs to find the right one, an attorney can instead give the pay stubs and the search criteria to CoCounsel, which can find the right one in seconds. The tool has strengthened the firm’s legal work, Gibson said.
“That time saving, it means money saved for clients and law firms,” he said. “For us, we can help more people, because we have more time.”
Renée Hutchins, the dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey Law School, saw a different path for AI being used in legal work. She acknowledged the tool would help make legal work more efficient, but it also eliminates the human element of lawyering, she said.
If a lawyer combs through pay stubs themselves, they can look their client in the eyes and say they understand the concerns and their struggle, versus handing over pay stubs and saying a tool scanned a client’s pay stubs and found the right things.
“There is a human component to that communication that may be lost,” she said.
Similarly, she worried about the future generation of attorneys who won’t do routine tasks that are handed over to AI. Going through documents is how budding lawyers become familiar with what may be in important documents and identify patterns.
“Perhaps training young lawyers on client matters is not the most efficient way to get that work done, but I do think that we’re going to have to think critically about how to get that training done if it is not being done on live cases now,” she said.
She also raised other concerns, like giving AI confidential information, trusting the AI tool too much and getting wrong information, and the question of whether the access gap would actually close.
The best-case scenario, she said, is that the tool will help underrepresented communities have access to legal representation. The worst case is that richer people can afford a live lawyer aided by AI, while poorer people will only have access to the AI tool.
“What concerns me more than lawyers being aided by AI, it’s lawyers being replaced by AI in spaces where the work of lawyers is more than just crunching out a product — it’s about engagement with the client on a very human plane,” she said.
Gibson didn’t share the same concerns of lawyers being replaced by AI. Google can’t replace his law degree, and AI can’t either, he said.
He also said that even with the tool, there is a high bar for legal professionalism.
“You don’t just hand over the keys to the kingdom. You have to keep upholding the standards that make Maryland lawyers great,” he said.
He acknowledged the tool might promote inefficiency in lawyers if they can rely on AI — for example, not checking the information the tool gives them.
But like with any technology, he said, there’s a learning curve.
“There’s going to be some growing pains for sure, but ultimately, I think it’s going to be a net positive for Maryland workers, from my perspective, and I think the broader public that needs lawyers,” he said.
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