From hybrid work to cloud adoption to workflow automation and data privacy, the pace of change in the legal industry has been breathtaking. It will only accelerate further from here as artificial intelligence (AI) tools multiply and improve in accuracy and reliability. In recent years, innovation has become a sort of watchword of the legal profession, mostly because lawyers in private practice operate in a hyper-competitive market, with clients demanding greater speed and efficiency. Firms and lawyers who don’t embrace this movement will fall behind at their own peril.
I enjoy learning about how innovation and exploration is happening in worlds that are totally divorced from the one I inhabit, in part because it helps me understand, appreciate and reflect on innovation and change in the legal industry. Take the bottom of the ocean, for example. I’ve always been fascinated by deep ocean exploration. In June 2023, when an innovative tourist submersible vessel called the Titan imploded in the North Atlantic during an expedition to explore the wreck of the Titanic, I wondered what sorts of innovation (and nerve) it took to get down there and back successfully and why anyone would risk their life to do it.
Then, I came across Susan Casey’s new book, “The Underworld,” which tells the story of modern-day deep ocean exploration and the design innovations that have allowed submersible vehicles to carry intrepid researchers down to unexplored murky depths. I highly recommend this book to anyone who shares my curiosity for the deep ocean, which is defined as the roughly three quarters of the world’s oceans (starting about 650 feet below the surface) that receive no sunlight. (Just that statistic alone I find hard to comprehend—most of the Earth is covered by ocean and most of that water is beyond the reach of natural light.) Casey’s account is part history—she traces the lineage of deep-submersible vehicles (DSVs) from the 16th century to the present—and part a retelling of her experiences as a journalist tagging along on some deep ocean expeditions. These include joining the billionaire investor Victor Vescovo on a voyage to the base of an underwater volcano. Casey even witnesses Vescovo’s record-breaking dive to the deepest point in the ocean, a cleft in the Mariana Trench known as the Challenger Deep, which bottoms out at 36,000 feet below sea level. By comparison, the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point in the world, is 29,000 feet above sea level.
Oceanographers used to lament the fact that more people had been to the moon than to the bottom of the ocean. That is no longer the case. More than a million square miles of deep seafloor have been mapped, many thousands of biological samples have been collected and many new species recorded. Casey predicts that soon “fleets of drones will monitor the deep cooperatively, sharing information, responding to conditions and transmitting data to the surface.” Some of this information could lead to new cures for old diseases as we increase our understanding of how marine life survives in the hostile environment of the deep ocean. The progress and effects of climate change can also be understood and possibly addressed by studying the deep ocean.
Casey’s descriptions of the investments in innovation that have allowed submersibles to withstand the pressures at great ocean depths also made me think of innovations in the field of AI. In both cases, we are gaining access to vast troves of knowledge and information. More data has been generated in the past two years than in all previous recorded history, creating a deep ocean of data waiting to be explored and analyzed.
Deep ocean voyages and AI also come with considerable peril. The errors sometimes made by AI chatbots are legendary at this point, including at least one very flawed legal brief written with the help of ChatGPT. Much has also been written about the risk that AI, if not thoughtfully and carefully developed, could make uncorrectable commercial mistakes, violate the law or even endanger human civilization as machines are permitted to make a growing number of decisions for us. Meanwhile, deep ocean travel offers the potential for a greater understanding of the oceans but also the potential of commercial ventures that, if not properly planned with tested equipment, could end in disaster. That is the now infamous story of the Titan, whose pilots ignored red flags about possible system failures during dives of extreme depths seemingly in the interest of commercial gains. The lesson to be learned in both cases is that innovation of any type must be tested and evaluated constantly along the way to discover and resolve risk.
One final point—in addition to writing an engaging and thought-provoking book, Casey is to be applauded for urging vigilance so that we avoid damage to critical ecosystems as more vessels gain access to the seafloor. We are in a similar place with the deployment of AI and machine learning—technologies that have immense power to transform as well as the potential for ethical and even existential risks that we have yet to fully apprehend. As AI finds its way into more and more corners of our lives, we lawyers have a crucial role to play by helping our firms and clients take advantage of this powerful new tool in a way that complies with the law, ensures a diversity of perspectives and protects the ecosystem that we all inhabit.