My UW Law Library colleague, Kris Turner, and I give a lot of presentations on generative AI in legal practice. Among several headlines we share about AI’s impact on society is a Wall Street Journal article, A Dead Father, Reincarnated With AI: Is This How We Will Remember Loved Ones Now? People are often aghast. Then we ask a different question: what if the person being recreated wasn’t a family member but a colleague, and the goal was to keep institutional knowledge rather than a memory?

A recent Law.com article, Will Your Law Firm Build an AI Copy of You?, shows that this is already happening. Several firms have worked with Stanford’s Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab (liftlab) to build AI personas of their attorneys. Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease has created 40 so far and plans more. Twin1, a startup backed by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, builds AI “digital twins” of knowledge workers from their emails and work product, and its customers include several large firms.

That is the scenario we pose to audiences, and it’s already a reality. At Vorys, several of those attorneys have since retired, and their personas still operate under the same names. Twin1 offers what it calls “emeritus” twins, built to keep the knowledge of people who have left so current employees can learn about past matters.

This technology raises a number of issues. I immediately thought of two but there are likely more. The first is authority and oversight. Twin1 sees its twins as communication tools that answer messages and find information “on behalf of their human models,” so colleagues and other AI systems don’t have to wait for a response. Umm, “human models”? Yikes.

The company’s CEO also told Law.com that a twin can decide on its own whether to pass a message along, based on its relationship with the sender. When a twin makes that kind of call, who reviews it, and who is responsible if it gets it wrong?

Then there is ownership. Who has a right to your persona? Firms have not settled on an answer. Davis Wright Tremaine’s pilot treats each lawyer as the owner of their persona. Vorys treats personas like other work product, so they belong to the firm. Vorys partner Scott Powell distinguished a persona, which captures an attorney’s thinking style and approach to legal work, from the attorney themselves: “It is not a replication of that person’s identity or expertise.” That distinction may be harder to keep when a persona keeps working under a retired lawyer’s name.

Wow – lots to think about here. Welcome to the new frontier!

by Bonnie Shucha with organizational and drafting assistance from Claude AI. All content was reviewed and refined for accuracy by the author.