On 26 May it was a great pleasure to chair a roundtable discussion on AI, entitled the “AI Revolution”.
The New Zealand Bar Association and Shortland Chambers jointly hosted the roundtable, at Shortland Chambers. The presenter, Winslow Taub of Covington & Burling’s San Francisco office, kindly interrupted his vacation in New Zealand with his family and gave a fascinating talk on just what AI is, how to make sense of it and how those of us who are interested in doing so can hopefully leverage it in our various legal practices.
Winslow Taub (on left) and Clive Elliott KC (on right)
Winslow in action
Winslow is an IT and AI expert, and both a software engineer and attorney. He acts for a number of high-profile silicon valley companies. He provided a short but highly informative overview of the latest technology. Today, there are so many commercial offerings and they all seem to offer much the same thing. However, it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. Winslow explained how LLMs, generic chatbots, GPTs, reasoning models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) work and outlined the various commercial models that are available today, from the likes of Claude and Gemini (which I use), through to expensive professional class AI tools such as Harvey (which large US law firms prefer). It is clear that no one size fits all.
Winslow also discussed one of the newest frontiers, agentic AI and its challenges. He explained that this represents the next significant leap in AI, moving beyond systems that simply respond to prompts or generate content, to those that can autonomously make decisions, plan multi-step processes, and execute specific tasks to achieve its designated goal, but with little or no human supervision.
He also delved into the question of where AI is heading and addressed some of the regulatory and ethical concerns, with a particular emphasis on lawyers’ ethical duties to their clients.
A robust discussion followed, including how the next generation of lawyers is going to be trained, how lawyers should charge for services which have been provided using AI and an interesting discussion arose as to whether lawyers can charge more or should charge less when they use AI.
The turnout was excellent for a presentation organised at very short notice and with rain and high wind warnings that evening, but it turned out to be an extremely interesting presentation and discussion for those of us trying to understand an area of technology that is moving extremely quickly but cannot be ignored.
