Last month, the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL) hosted a lunchtime talk titled “AI In Law Firms: From Hype to Reality (what new associates need to know).” The conversation featured Jeff Kelly and Adrianne Cleven of Nelson Mullins, who shared how they integrate technology, particularly AI tools, into their daily lives and legal practice.
Kelly is a technology attorney who guides companies and their executives through complex, high-stakes challenges at the intersection of litigation, regulation, and innovation. Cleven is a corporate associate who focuses her practice on business transactions and compliance in highly regulated industries, including healthcare, securities regulation, and financial technology matters.
Kelly and Cleven emphasized the importance of allowing attorneys to use AI programs in low-stakes situations, so they can learn how to use and optimize their use of the technology.
“We want people to have low-stakes experimentation,” Kelly said. “I am sure that many of you use these tools; you know where they are helpful, but sometimes you run into extremely bizarre responses. It is an interesting time to be experimenting, because a lot of that weird, not fully expected behavior is actually what we are hunting for.”
The pair also discussed how students can figure out ways to maintain their eligibility as human players amidst the explosion of AI technologies. Kelly emphasized that the skills which lawyers possess remain extremely valuable and crucial. AI tools can help them leverage their time and their staff in more productive ways.
“There’s a lot of ways [AI] is showing up in useful, discrete ways that is making the overwhelming nature of the practice a bit more manageable,” Kelly said. “You start to see where [something] is not a loss of time, and where there’s a lot more loss too.”
Cleven emphasized the need to scrutinize these tools and their answers.
“I think the great allure of AI tools is their confidence [and] their passion,” Cleven said. “It will perform tasks with such confidence that you need a human to say, ‘I am not even that confident myself,’ so how can I have a whole team looking through [the AI’s production] on the back end.”
The panel discussed ways that new associates can learn on the job without relying on AI to do the work for them. Kelly noted how often firms caution first-year associates against using AI tools, because they want associates to do the hard work themselves.
“Most of our first-year associates, while we give them access to plenty of tools, our preference is we want [them] to do this,” Kelly said. “We want [them] to see what it is to prepare a document.”
Cleven added that AI can enhance the learning process during this time if the associate is the one leading and writing the document.
“It you’re using [AI] in a collaborative process, I’d almost argue that you’re learning throughout that,” Cleven said. “It is [able] to pull links for me that I would have only found on the fourth page of a Google search, which is huge. And then I am doing my reading [and other work on the front end].”
