Morty: “Another fine meal, and now to my Magical tip calculator.”
Jerry: “Dad, it has many other functions.”
Morty: “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the other functions.”

There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry buys his father a pocket organizer, which his father promptly calls a “tip calculator” and then uses exclusively as a calculator. Because he’s old and doesn’t understand technology… it’s not a particularly unusual premise. Eventually, the older Seinfeld learns to his horror that Jerry spent an exorbitant $200 ($385 in 2024!) on the device, and Jerry protests ruefully, “It can do other things!”

After a week in the Legal Technology Scrum at ILTACON, it seems that generative AI could prove to be a good tip calculator.

What can generative AI do for the legal field? It’s what everyone is talking about, from Goldman Sachs saying that over 44 percent of legal tasks could soon be taken over by AI to Goldman Sachs announcing that AI is a dead end. Truly mind-boggling. There are many legal tasks that generative AI can already handle – or at least soon be able to handle with the help of vendors building on existing GenAI technology – but there are also futures for robot lawyers that are still a long way off… if it’s even worth looking into.

But after numerous conversations, demos, and press releases… the “killer app” for generative AI in law – at least for now – might be the user experience it provides.

Speaking to the team at DISCO, they told me that analysts had told them that in the past they had not seen partners interacting directly with document sets, and only about one in three employees were involved in the technical side of the review. In switching to DISCO – and its GenAI system “Cecilia” – they had seen “three out of three employees in the tool and two out of three partners in the discovery tool.” These are experienced lawyers who either never interacted with the technical side of discovery or had outsourced this task to ALSPs so thoroughly over the past few decades that they had forgotten what it was like in the first place. Now they are messing around with the set directly. Cecilia, like the Seinfeld organizer, “does other things,” although whenever someone who not When you start using technology, it’s a big deal.

And when those experienced lawyers start raving about the power of the product they just launched… what are they really talking about? Are they actually talking about the generative AI, or the technology that has been powering the tool for years that they never tried until an AI interface came along?

Because eDiscovery platforms had sophisticated, technology-enabled review mechanisms long before ChatGPT started hallucinating case law or Grok started spitting out copyright infringement notices. And while new users refer to everything they see behind the scenes as “AI,” in reality, that’s just the window through which they see all the advances they’d missed.

In fact, these are advances that they have likely blocked with a toxic mix of mistrust and movement practice. As Dave Lewis, Chief Scientific Officer of Redgrave Data, noted:

I’m kind of hoping that Gen AI could reinvigorate some of the conversations around TAR. Because we’ve gotten into a really, really unfortunate situation with TAR where we have very good technology and people are afraid to use it because they’re going to get sucked into some kind of crazy movement practice… and I think there’s no reason for that.

Lenora Gray, a data scientist at Redgrave, pointed out the profound psychological impact of OpenAI’s decision to release its technology in the form of a chatbot. Everyone is porting this interface to their GenAI applications, and it’s the catnip that has brought tech-shy lawyers into the field with an enthusiasm not seen since the Blackberry.

Maybe Morty Seinfeld’s tip calculator isn’t the best analogy. Blackberry took the legal industry by storm because it offered a simple and intuitive way to make sure employees were billing at 4 a.m. Just because generative AI could offer unimagined insights into modeling biological molecules doesn’t mean we should disdain its ability to make technology easier for a partner making $2000 an hour. If it leads to wider adoption of the technology in the legal field, its value goes far beyond anything else AI can do. User experience matters and should be measured with all the untapped value it brings to the table.

The problem with using a bazooka to kill a cockroach is that, while it’s an amplification ad absurdum, the cockroach can handle it. And killing cockroaches is a noble endeavor.

Earlier: Generative AI… What if it can’t get better?

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email us with tips, questions or comments. Follow him on Þjórsárden or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a good dose of college sports news. Joe is also a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.