Munger, Tolles & Olson Partner Miriam Kim Interviewed by The American Lawyer on her Generative AI Research and How it Can Help Close the Justice Gap

Munger, Tolles & Olson partner Miriam Kim was interviewed by The American Lawyer about her research into generative AI and how it can help close the access to justice gap.

During her recent sabbatical, Ms. Kim served as a fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, where she conducted a pilot study with legal aid lawyers and found that AI tools helped save time and improve legal services.

Ms. Kim and UC Berkeley School of Law professor Colleen Chien conducted a study where they gave 91 public interest lawyers free access to three paid AI tools: ChatGPT-4, Gavel and Co-Counsel. They found that, despite the risks and limitations of generative AI, the lawyers found ways to use the tools to save time on various legal and non-legal tasks.

Ms. Kim and Professor Chien created a database of 100 use cases participants identified for AI tools among their work tasks—including how much time they saved and how likely they were to use AI for the task again.

One of the surprising findings of the study was that women, who make up most of the legal aid workforce, were much less likely to use AI tools than men. After the study was over, the survey showed that men and women had comparable results in how they felt about generative AI tools, as well as their plans to use them in the future.

In the article, Ms. Kim noted that she hopes her research will inspire more “tech bono,” a term coined by Professor Chien, where law firms and legal tech companies can offer their technological expertise and resources to legal aid organizations. She said that there is a lot of potential for collaboration and feedback between legal aid lawyers and AI developers.

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