- The complex legal landscape around AI is ushering in a "golden age" for technology attorneys.
- Companies are seeking legal help as they adopt AI-powered tools in their business practices.
- One lawyer predicted "it'll be at least a 10 year boon, if not longer."
As industries are jumping into the AI race with both feet, technology attorneys are seeing a big boon.
The legal landscape surrounding the rapidly evolving technology remains complex, giving lawyers specializing in AI work plenty of opportunities to assist companies not only involved building AI tools, but also those interested in using the tech.
"It's a golden age for technology attorneys," Frank Pasquale, a law professor at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, told Business Insider. "I don't think I've ever seen such a situation where there's such a huge coordinated push to get a form of technology into so many different businesses."
Pasquale expects that lawsuits are "certainly going to follow" as the technology, in some cases, "predictably fails or violates people's rights or just doesn't function" as intended.
"Companies are nervous," added Harry Surden, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School. "They need advice about policies around AI, so they're going to reach out to law firms that are developing AI policies and practices to help guide them."
More than a half-dozen tech attorneys from across the United States who spoke to BI agreed that AI — especially generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini — is giving way to a heyday in the legal field.
The lawyers are fielding a bevy of calls from clients and potential clients about how they and their companies can properly integrate AI in their business operations, along with other concerns about confidentiality and possible legal implications of using the tech.
One veteran tech attorney predicted there will be at least a 10-year boon
"Right now there's so many unanswered legal questions and there's so many different laws that are being proposed that I think it'll be at least a 10 year boon, if not longer," James Gatto, a partner at Sheppard Mullin who co-leads the firm's AI industry team of about 100 attorneys, told BI.
Gatto and other attorneys likened the generative AI boom to the rise of the internet in the 1990s.
"Similar to the internet, every company is going to use AI and every company needs to deal with the AI issues, and most companies aren't really prepared to do it," Gatto said. "So they need to lawyer up."
Sheppard Mullin, an international firm headquartered in California, has received an influx of calls from companies in recent months seeking counsel on the use of generative AI, according to Gatto.
"We're seeing everything from the creative works like music, games, etcetera to healthcare," said Gatto, who noted, "Every industry, every sector, every type of company is figuring out how they want to use AI, and they all need help."
And companies are shelling out big bucks for that legal help.
Gatto's team assists companies in developing AI policies and forming internal AI "governance committees," which they then train and get up to speed on the key legal issues that could arise.
This kind of work could run a company anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to more than $100,000, according to the veteran attorney, who has been advising clients on AI-related issues over the last two decades.
Companies are exploring how AI will impact their businesses
Peter Werner, a partner at the global law firm Cooley — which represents Meta and Google in AI-related litigation — called it a "very exciting time" for technology-focused attorneys.
Werner said the boon is similar to the late 90s when law firms had a speciality internet practice and only some companies were experimenting with the internet.
Now, the internet has become "ubiquitous," he said.
"Every company is on the internet," Werner said. "Every company has legal issues associated with being on the internet."
"Same thing for AI," he said.
AI is something that all of Cooley's roughly 10,000 clients, mostly in the technology and life sciences sectors, are dealing with, according to Werner.
"And it's not just companies that are developing an AI technology as part of the infrastructure of the AI economy," said Werner. "It's also every company, no matter what their industry is, needing to figure out how they're going to evolve and compete by leveraging AI and related technologies."
Werner said that in many recent cases, the law firm has gotten outreach from companies "not historically in our wheelhouse" seeking legal help around AI and any potential implications related to the use of the technology.
Companies are exploring how AI will impact their terms of service and how the technology can be used for employee recruitment or other aspects of business operations, said Werner.
"We have some of the most sophisticated AI-focused companies in the world who we work with, and we are defending them in significant, high-stakes litigation, and we're helping counsel them about their business model," said Werner.
And then there's the non-technology companies who have been reaching out to the firm for help on AI "and everywhere in between," he said.
"You've got all levels of sophistication at all different stages of company development in all different geographies and all different industries," Werner said. "They are fundamentally wrestling with the same question, which is how is AI and generative AI in particular and related technologies going to affect my business?"
AI raises a host of novel legal concerns
While there is no uniform federal law or regulations that address the use of AI in the US, the technology raises a host of novel legal concerns related to intellectual property rights, privacy and data protection, liability, and human rights issues involving bias and discrimination.
AI companies have already faced copyright lawsuits from authors, visual artists, news outlets, and computer coders who argue that their original work has been used to train AI tools without their permission.
"There's a variety of legal issues. Some of them have more clear answers, and some of them are a real gray area that I think will probably have to be addressed by the courts or by Congress," said Frank Gerratana, a partner at the firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.
This is typically the case with new technology, Gerratana and other attorneys pointed out.
"The hard part as an attorney," he said, "is that any new technology often raises issues we haven't seen before, and so the answers that our clients want are not always going to be clear."
The New York-headquartered international firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, has also experienced an uptick in calls from both existing and new clients over the last 10 to 18 months, thanks to AI, according to attorneys at the firm who anticipate even more inquiries in the near future.
"What we saw recently with a client of ours in the pharmaceutical space is that they were asked to agree in a contract that they wouldn't use AI in a certain part of the work that they were hired to perform. So we're going to see tons of that kind of interaction in the transactional, contractual space," said Elisa Botero, a partner at the firm.
Michel Paradis, another partner at the firm, said companies have also made queries involving confidentiality concerns when it comes to inputting sensitive information into generative AI tools.
"AI does have the effect, if nothing else, of putting very sophisticated, very complicated technology in the hands of lots of people who do lots of things and who run into all sorts of regulatory regimes and create all sorts of, let's be frank, legal trouble that they may not even fully understand, that these new tools make possible," said Paradis.
Paradis and Botero say they expect the role of a tech attorney to expand.
"I think you're going to see lawyers with a technical background having to learn new areas of law that they never thought they would have to deal with" and vice versa, said Paradis.
AI could drastically change how law firms operate, too
Werner, the partner at Cooley, called it a "very dynamic moment" for tech attorneys as he warned that law firms also need to be thinking about how AI is disrupting their own industry.
"Today, we're doing great," Werner said, before raising questions about how the legal industry will be impacted by AI in the future.
"Big law firms that are not thinking deeply about business model issues are going to be in trouble in 10,15, 20 years, for sure," he cautioned.