In the Media
John Rosenthal Discusses Winston’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy Group with Legaltech News
In the Media
February 6, 2024
Winston & Strawn partner John Rosenthal was featured in a Q&A with Legaltech News where he discussed the firm’s recently announced Artificial Intelligence Strategy Group. John spoke about the group’s mission, how it evaluates generative AI legal solutions, and where the technology isn’t yet meeting the firm’s standards. The group acts as trusted advisors to clients going through struggles with the technology, and has an internal mission of determining how the firm is going to adopt technology to become more efficient, cost-effective, and deliver better legal services.
John discussed the structure of the group noting a subcommittee focused on thought leadership, a product evaluation group, and a practice group subcommittee focused on what services are being delivered to clients and how they are being delivered.
“We have two co-chairs, myself and [Krishnan Padmanabhan]…We have a leadership team of three or four people [focused] on strategic issues and … working with our IT team, the administrative groups, as well as the practice groups trying to figure out internally where we’re going with these tool sets… And the leadership group probably meets at least once a week, probably for an hour,” said. “And I would tell you that right now it takes a lot of time because we’re working with our clients. We’re meeting with vendors, we’re benchmarking with other law firms. We’re working with suppliers to evaluate their products.”
When asked what practice areas he sees having the most cross over with this technology John stated, “I would say e-discovery, we were already there, because the reality is, [while] lawyers are technologically adverse, e-discovery has to be technologically focused. And we’ve been using large language models in some form or another for years. We’ve been using all kinds of AI. The difference is, this is AI for Dummies. You don’t need a technologist to put in the magic words. That’s why this took off in March 2023. Because you combined a large language model with natural language query.”
