NEW YORK – Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, recently predicted that artificial intelligence will be able to replace, or fully automate, most white-collar tasks within 12 to 18 months. Suleyman said the shift will primarily affect roles involving computer-based work—such as accountants, lawyers, marketers, and project managers.
Were these words hyperbolic? Accurate? Absurd? Richard Volack (pictured), partner and chair, Cyber Security & Data Privacy, Peckar & Abramson, has thought about these questions for a while. Back in December 2024 at Construction Super Conference in Las Vegas, Volack talked about the emerging phenomenon of generative AI, explaining that, “Generative AI has the ability to do everything the original AI did, but now it can create things for you.”
Not to be confused with the holy grail (or civilization-destroying tech) of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Gen AI is already here and many white collar workers are embracing its benefits. What are the current risks and rewards? We caught up with Volack to get his thoughts on the fast-moving topic of AI.
Third Thursday: What do you think of Suleyman’s prediction?
Volack: It sounds very unlikely to me. AI is great at performing rote tasks. However, remember that at its core it is just looking for patterns in data and comparing those patterns to other data. The AI systems in use today have a hard time doing the critical thinking and reasoning that is required of lawyers.
Third Thursday: What is an example of that?
Volack: AI systems can locate case citations for a specific issue in a specific area of law. However, the AI has a harder time then comparing the facts and issues of your client’s case to the facts and issues in the case citations. It has a hard time reasoning, again, due to its reliance on patterns and statistics. The AI, especially if the initial prompt is too simple and lacks context and details, has a hard time distinguishing between patterns (which it is good at) and the actual context in which the question is being asked—leading to poorly reasoned answers.
Third Thursday: How has AI helped with “document-intensive” tasks within construction law?
Volack: AI is more than a glorified search function. AI has been helpful, especially for first passes at document-intensive tasks. It can take a large set of documents and summarize it, give you answers about certain documents, and create a timeline of events in the documents.
Third Thursday: What are the current risks in using AI within the practice of construction law?
Volack: There are four current risks of using AI in construction law.
1) Accidently placing privileged and/or confidential material in an open-source AI platform. Those documents will instantly become public and the privilege and /or confidentiality is lost.
2) Certain platforms will hallucinate answers to your questions. That means they will make up answers / specific legal cases and present them as if they were real. Many attorneys have been sanctioned by the courts for submitting briefs containing citations to hallucinated cases.
3) The AI system will carry the bias of its programmer. This has to be taken into consideration when the system is being asked to sort and choose certain outcomes. The most common problem is using AI to sift through resumes for jobs. The AI will be biased towards those candidates with characteristics like its programmer.
4) There are also ethical rules that must be kept in mind when using AI. Those include requiring human oversight for any legal platform that uses AI, the requirement that a client’s documents be kept confidential, and the requirement that lawyers have a certain baseline understanding of how AI works and the pitfalls of using AI in their legal work.
Third Thursday: How have you used AI in your own practice?
Volack: I have used AI for the following: to summarize large groups of documents; to locate citations for certain cases and statutes; to get ideas regarding possible causes of action in a complaint; to help prepare power points for presentations; and to explore possible defenses for a cause of action.
Richard Volack is a partner in the Construction Law practice at Peckar & Abramson and chair of the firm’s Cyber Security & Data Privacy practice.