Preparing for the AI Wave in Litigation: Adapting to the Unknown

Nicole Hancock
Partner, Litigation

Abstract

Nicole Hancock, Partner in Stoel Rives’ Boise office, reflects on the sweeping changes technology—particularly artificial intelligence—is bringing to the legal industry. She compares the move from paper files to electronic records, once considered revolutionary, to a mere “speck of sand” compared to what lies ahead. Hancock emphasizes the challenge of preparing for an uncertain future, especially when court systems evolve at a much slower pace than the technology driving change. She stresses the importance of staying ahead of these developments, aligning legal strategies with the tools and processes clients use in their own businesses, and ensuring the ability to process vast amounts of data, assess legal risks, and effectively advocate for client interests.

Transcript

I am Nicole Hancock, and I am a partner in our Boise office. What we have to prepare ourselves for is how quickly things are going to change from where we are today to where we are going to be in six months or a year and even five years.

Part of the problem is that we do not know what our world is going to look like in five years with artificial intelligence and the different advances that we are seeing in technology that are already having sweeping changes in the legal industry. It continues to change, and it will change every aspect of how we provide legal services, how we advocate for our clients, how we will handle and manage all of the evidence that comes in, which right now are mountains of documents.

When we moved from a hard copy world into an electronically stored information world in litigation, that was a big change. That is going to look like a speck of sand on a beach compared to the amount of changes that we are going to see with the advancements in technology that are coming down the pipeline now. It is hard to prepare for it because we do not know what it is all going to look like. You overlay that against a judicial system that tends to move at a glacial pace, right? Changing the rules, changing the court system, changing the technology in our courtrooms and what our judges have access to, because they all have to go hand in hand for the whole system to move together.

There are a lot of changes that are coming down the road that we are trying to stay in front of but also trying to prepare for the unknown as well, and then being responsive to what our clients are seeing and using within their own businesses and making sure that matches up with what we need in order to be able to advocate for them, process their information, know what their issues are, protect against the legal risks, and advocate their rights.