As the industry goes full throttle in the AI race, technology lawyers are benefiting greatly.
The legal landscape surrounding this rapidly evolving technology remains complex, and lawyers specializing in AI practice have many opportunities to assist companies building AI tools as well as those interested in using the technology.
“It's a golden age to be a technology lawyer,” Frank Pasquale, a professor at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, told Business Insider. “I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before, where there's this large, coordinated effort across so many different companies to implement some type of technology.”
Pasquale expects lawsuits “are inevitable” because in some cases the technology “doesn't work as expected, violates people's rights, or simply doesn't work as intended.”
“Businesses are worried,” added Harry Tharden, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law. “They need advice on AI policy and will be reaching out to law firms that are developing AI policy and practice for guidance.”
More than a half-dozen tech lawyers from across the U.S. who spoke to BI agreed that AI, particularly generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, is reaching its prime in the legal field.
Lawyers are receiving numerous calls from clients and potential clients about how to properly integrate AI into their operations, as well as concerns about confidentiality and legal ramifications of using the technology.
Veteran technology lawyers predicted the benefits will continue for at least a decade.
“Right now, there are so many unanswered legal questions and so much proposed legislation that I think the benefits will last at least a decade, maybe longer,” James Gatto, a partner at Sheppard Mullin and co-leader of the firm's AI industry team, which has about 100 lawyers, told BI.
Gatto and other lawyers liken the boom in generative AI to the rise of the internet in the 1990s.
“Just like the internet, every company is going to use AI, and every company is going to have to deal with AI issues, and most companies aren't prepared for that,” Gatto said. “So they're going to need to hire lawyers.”
Gatto said the California-based international law firm Sheppard Mullin has been inundated with calls in recent months from companies seeking advice on using generative AI.
“Every sector is using AI, from creative work like music and games to healthcare,” Gatto said. “Every industry, every sector, every type of business is exploring how they want to use AI, and they all need help.”
And companies are paying big bucks for that legal help.
Gatto's team helps companies develop AI policies and form internal AI “governance committees,” then provides training and understanding of key legal issues that may arise.
This type of work can potentially bring in tens of thousands of dollars to more than $100,000 for a company, according to a veteran lawyer who has advised clients on AI-related issues for the past two decades.
Companies are considering how AI will impact their business
Peter Warner, a partner at international law firm Cooley, which is representing Meta and Google in AI-related litigation, said it's a “very exciting time” to be a tech lawyer.
Warner said the benefits are similar to the late 1990s, when law firms had specialized internet practices and only a few businesses were experimenting with the internet.
The internet is now “everywhere,” he said.
“Every business has an internet presence,” Warner said. “Every business has legal issues that come with being on the internet.”
“The same can be said about AI,” he said.
Warner said AI is something all of Cooley's roughly 10,000 clients, mostly in the technology and life sciences sectors, are working on.
“It's not just companies that are developing AI technologies as part of the infrastructure of the AI economy,” Werner said. “All companies, regardless of industry, need to think about how they will evolve and compete with AI and related technologies.”
Warner said that in many recent cases, law firms have been approached by companies seeking legal assistance around AI and potential implications related to their use of the technology, “which was not previously their area of expertise.”
Warner said companies are considering how AI will impact their terms of service and how they can use the technology in employee recruitment and other aspects of running their businesses.
“We partner with some of the most sophisticated AI-focused companies in the world, defending them in significant, costly litigation and advising them on their business models,” Warner said.
Additionally, he said, non-tech companies have been reaching out to the company for help with AI and “everything in between.”
“Every geography, every industry, every stage of company evolution, every level of sophistication,” Warner says. “They're all fundamentally grappling with the same question: How will AI, particularly generative AI, and related technologies impact my business?”
AI raises many new legal concerns
While there is no uniform federal law or regulation addressing the use of AI in the United States, the technology raises many new legal concerns related to intellectual property rights, privacy and data protection, liability, and human rights issues, including bias and discrimination.
AI companies are already facing copyright lawsuits from authors, visual artists, media outlets and computer programmers who claim their original works have been used to train AI tools without their permission.
“There are a wide variety of legal issues. Some have clear answers, while others are in a gray area that the courts and Congress will have to address,” said Frank Geratana, a partner at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo law firm.
That's common with new technology, Gelattana and other lawyers said.
“The challenge as a lawyer is that new technology often brings up problems we've never seen before, so the answers our clients want aren't always clear-cut,” he said.
Curtis, Mallet, Prevost, Colt & Mosle, a New York-based international law firm, also said that AI has increased calls from both existing and new clients over the past 10 to 18 months, and lawyers there expect to see even more inquiries in the near future.
“We've seen cases recently with pharmaceutical clients where they've been asked to agree in their contracts not to use AI in certain parts of the work they've been hired to do, so you're going to see a lot of this interaction in the transactional and contractual space,” said Elisa Botero, a partner at the firm.
Michel Paradis, another partner at the firm, said companies have also been contacted about confidentiality concerns about feeding sensitive information into generative AI tools.
“AI has the effect, at a minimum, of putting very sophisticated and complex technology into the hands of many people doing many things. They're going to run into different regulatory regimes and get into a lot of legal trouble that, frankly, may not fully understand what's enabled by these new tools,” Paradis said.
Paradis and Botero said they expect the role of technology lawyers to expand.
“I think we'll see situations where lawyers with technology backgrounds will have to learn new areas of law that they never thought they'd have to deal with,” Paradis said, and vice versa.
AI could also dramatically change the way law firms operate.
Warner, the partner at Cooley Law, called this a “very dynamic moment” for tech lawyers and warned that law firms also need to think about how AI is disrupting their industries.
“Right now, we're on a roll,” Warner said, raising the question of how AI will affect the legal industry in the future.
“Big law firms that don't think deeply about their business model will definitely be in trouble in 10, 15, 20 years' time,” he warned.
