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Chief
Is there a planner in New York u admire?
When work from office is going to resume???
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Subject Expert
Have any GT offices other than NY matched?
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Coach
Kleinberg Kaplan thoughts anyone?
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Mentor
From a lit perspective, AI is essentially garbage that cannot produce a memo or brief, and whatever it produces takes longer to fix than it would have taken to draft from scratch. What it can do is serve as a control+f function on steroids and across documents.
Subject Expert
Corporate here - AI is very good at discrete tasks with tightly defined parameters (eg, “perform a red-flag review of this contract using the provided checklist as a guide and give a bulleted list of material legal issues.” Or “revise this email to be more concise.” Or “propose edits to this indemnification clause to be more buyer-friendly”). It’s also decent at due diligence/contract review (see Kira) IF the data going in is clean.
Beyond that, it’s mostly trash. Like if you were to rely on AI to draft a whole purchase agreement from scratch, you (and your client) would be completely cooked.
Subject Expert
Oh I think for sure you can get a pretty decent initial draft if you give it good inputs and a solid precedent, especially for simpler deals. But it’s gonna take time to review to make sure it got everything right and fix whatever it didn’t. But let’s say it did get everything right, producing the initial draft is only a slice of the job on a complex deal, you know?
I mean the initial drafting is kinda the easy part. The real work is the negotiation, reacting to diligence, figuring out what matters and what doesn’t, reading the room, making judgment calls, etc. Don’t get me started on managing all the difficult personalities (including on the business side). AI can spit out language, but at least for now, it can’t run a deal.
Anything that involves strategic reasoning or nuanced argument. It can, however, summarize and generalize, when that's what you need.
Mentor
Currently it’s very much a work in progress in all sorts of ways. Assuming it perfects all the doc and research work though, it’s the human communications and judgement/strategy/negotiations/relationships that it won’t replace (and for litigators, the courtroom). That’s why I feel pretty safe as an M&A 5th year - even if it did get perfect at docs, my job is already heavily people-focused and will only be moreso as I get more senior.
Project management. Not keeping track of things, but actually managing the humans that seemingly don’t know how to read beyond the first five words.