Last year, over 34,000 pages of new legislation were adopted. This is an increase of 8 percent compared to 2022 and is the second-highest number ever recorded. A total of 553 new regulations for businesses came into effect, and 1051 changed their wording. During the same period, only 41 regulations lost their validity, as shown by the Law Barometer from Grant Thornton. Keeping up with the changes is a significant challenge. Artificial intelligence can assist lawyers with this task. However, only a small percentage of lawyers currently utilize modern solutions.
“Poland is a leader in terms of the number of changes in law, especially in recent years. According to the Law Barometer report by Grant Thornton, the number of legal acts can vary by over 50 percent year-on-year. The situation looks even worse when it comes to changes in legislation concerning businesses,” says Sebastian Szczepański, CEO of Currendy, a producer of specialized software for the judiciary and bailiff’s offices, in conversation with Newseria Biznes agency.
The scale of changes in law is overwhelming, not least because it is rare in Poland for specific bureaucratic requirements to lose their validity. Legal changes almost always involve amending existing regulations or adding more. In 2023, only 41 regulations were repealed, which means that for each repealed law, 39 new or changed regulations required adaptation – as indicated by the experts from Grant Thornton.
“This shows that there are many legal changes, and keeping up with them is a significant challenge, not only for lawyers but also for businesses and individuals. Everyone is equal before the law, and everyone must adhere to it,” reminds Sebastian Szczepański.
Diligently tracking regulations appears to be almost physically impossible. If someone wanted to keep up with all changes in law in 2023, they would have to spend 2 hours and 34 minutes every workday just reading legal acts, meaning that they would have to read an average of 77 pages of laws and regulations each day.
“Artificial intelligence can support lawyers. However, it is not meant as a set of rules used in the solution, but as intelligence that can learn, follow the user, track their behavior, use their profile, and assist in searching for various types of legal changes,” evaluates the CEO of Currendy.
Artificial Intelligence can analyze legislation projects with complex titles containing the names of many legal acts and indicate which changes relate to the legal acts of interest to the user. This eliminates the need for separate scanning of the project contents. Modern systems also connect the contents of explanations with laws, reducing the time needed to analyze and understand legislative changes.
“Standard legal information systems work in such a way that we have a search engine, we enter the word we are interested in, and we get information about in which legal acts this word was found. Artificial Intelligence is able to learn about us, follow our behavior, track our profile, our searches, and then search appropriately for what we are interested in, what we need. It can inform us, for example, about legal changes that have occurred recently,” explains Sebastian Szczepański.
The future-ready lawyer survey report, published by Wolters Kluwer, indicates that the legal industry worldwide is bravely implementing revolutionary innovations, including Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Over 70 percent of lawyers expect to use GenAI at work, and 87 percent believe that technology has improved their daily work. When asked about the areas in which GenAI will affect lawyers’ work over the next three years, most respondents (77 percent) – working in both firms and legal departments – believe that it will be in the fields of predictive analytics and Big Data.
“We are keen on optimizing and streamlining work, so that we can timely search for and analyze legal changes, compare documents. This is the main reason why lawyers are interested in new technology,” explains the expert.
The “LegalTech 2024” report by publisher CH Beck indicates that still only a few lawyers use artificial intelligence as a source of legal knowledge – only 5.9 percent of lawyers in firms and 17.9 percent of lawyers employed in companies indicated this. However, nearly 30 percent believe that it will be the key legal tech segment for the legal industry. They see it as a chance to improve and speed up their work, simplify information search and document preparation. However, to fully realize this potential, it will be necessary to overcome barriers resulting from a lack of knowledge and trust as well as regulatory and ethical challenges. There have been increasingly more tools on the market that leverage artificial intelligence operation. Among these are advanced search engines. Meanwhile, the AIMON system, created by Currenda, allows for personalization of settings, enabling users to tailor the system to their needs and professional profile. Utilizing automation, it reduces the time required to monitor legal changes by up to 80 percent.
“AIMON system initially learns the user, tracks their behavior, investigates the context in which the user searches for interesting phrases, and is eventually able to suggest where we should search for changes if a legal act has changed. It analyzes documents, which obviously makes a lawyer’s work more effective,” convinces Sebastian Szczepański.
