With the help of Sabrina Pacifici, my article AI In High-Stakes Litigation: The Critical Role of Experienced Attorneys will be published this month at LLRX.com. Here is an excerpt:

The “Centaur” Approach Is the Optimal Model (For Now)

Today’s chess-playing computers can crush the best human players without breaking a sweat. This wasn’t always true. Twenty years ago, teams of the strongest humans and the most powerful computers were stronger than either humans or computers alone. These teams were sometimes called “centaurs.” They combined the strength of a mighty beast with human judgment.

For at least the next few years, legal centaur teams—combining the experience of the best lawyers and the best AI apps—will always win over the best human lawyers or the best AI apps working alone.

Today’s best legal AI experts (including Richard Susskind) believe that this may not always be true. They speculate that eventually computers will reach a stage of “hyperintelligence” in which AI systems become unfathomably more capable than humans. We are not there yet, and we may never get there. For the foreseeable future, experienced lawyers who know how to use AI will dominate.

Today, I have no problem asking an AI app a simple question about licensing of speech therapists. I would verify any of its analysis before relying on it for anything important, but AI is now my first choice for relatively simple questions where the stakes are low.

I would never dream of relying on an unassisted AI app for an important issue in $40 million litigation. Neither should you.

At the same time, today I would not trust my unassisted human judgment on a high-stakes matter.