AI goes on trial. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

One of the industries that is adopting artificial intelligence tools fastest is the legal field.

A recent report from the legal tech company, Clio, showed almost 80% of legal professionals are using AI in some way in their practice, up from about 30% last year.

Joshua Lennon is a lawyer in residence at Cleo,

and he says the profession is particularly ripe for tech disruption. The output of legal work

is often just text-based, and generative AI very quickly and easily produces written materials. And so for them, it's something that's

easy to use and generates the type of stuff they need. And so that's led to this huge adoption.

In fact, we think lawyers are adopting generative AI technology at a faster clip than most other

industries out there.

When we compare our own legal trends report research to that of, say, McKinsey, we're

seeing that lawyers are generally eight to nine percentage points higher in their adoption compared

to other industries out there.

And for those who may not be super familiar with kind of the background work of what lawyers do

or what happens at law firms, can you kind of explain the efficiencies that are gained

by implementing these AI tools?

Absolutely.

So if we look at the workflow of lawyers, they might receive a document

from opposing counsel that might require a response. And so they'll need to draft a response

to a motion. And that's a very formal document with some very specific formatting requirements,

depending upon the court that they're appearing before,

and some very specific outputs related to the goals.

When we look at artificial intelligence,

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