Bench & Bar July/August 2025

PRESIDENT'S PAGE

FROM NATURAL INTELLIGENCE TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE the FUTURE:

BY TODD V. MCMURTRY KBA PRESIDENT

T he smell of old leather books still takes me back to my father's law office in Covington, Ky. As a young boy, I would visit him often, sometimes doing homework at his conference room table and other times helping to clean his office on Saturdays—no maid service. The office was a monument to mid-20th cen tury legal practice: shelves lined with bound volumes, a secretary's desk crowned by an IBM Selectric typewriter, and filing cabinets holding the history of so many disputes. During my 15 years observing that office— first as a school kid, later as a law student working as a clerk—I witnessed many changes in legal technology. The typewriter gave way to word processors, law books yielded to electronic research databases, and handwritten correspondence transformed into email. Each change promised to make legal work faster and more efficient. My father was proud when he bought a Selectric typewriter, appreciating its design and how it improved his office's efficiency. But he was not a fan of the fax machine, feeling it inter rupted the normal pace of communication among lawyers. He preferred the time that drafting a letter allowed—time to consider a response without rushing.

issues with remarkable accuracy—not just flagging obvious problems but spotting subtle inconsistencies that might escape human attention. I experienced this first hand and was floored when it happened. When I provide AI with case facts and rel evant precedents, it generates first drafts of legal memoranda that capture essential arguments, though they require careful human review for nuance and strategy. It does in minutes what would have taken hours even a few years ago. It keeps improving. Recently, Claude took a stack of medical records and in seconds produced a detailed chronology of the client's treatment and prognosis. The technology excels at pat tern recognition and synthesis. It can create detailed chronologies from thousands of pages of discovery, summarize depositions while highlighting key contradictions, and identify relevant case law from massive databases. Most significantly, it accom plishes these tasks in minutes rather than hours, fundamentally altering the econom ics of legal research and document review. However, the technology's limitations are equally important. AI struggles with legal strategy that requires deep understanding of client psychology, judge preferences, or local legal culture. If you ask it for the

Through all these technological shifts, one constant remained: every sentence, every argument, every brief emerged from human intellect—what I call "Natural Intelligence." My father and his colleagues were the archi tects of every legal strategy. Technology merely helped them execute their vision more efficiently. Today, that fundamental truth has shat tered. Artificial Intelligence (AI), an emerging powerful technology, does not just help lawyers work faster; it has begun to think alongside us, and sometimes instead of us. This represents the most significant transformation in legal practice since the creation of the Anglo-American Common Law System. Natural Intelligence no longer drafts every word and strategy. For the past 18 months, I have integrated AI tools into my daily practice, primarily using Claude.ai and Lexis+AI. I am now evalu ating more specialized legal AI suites to expand how I use AI. This firsthand experi ence, combined with extensive research, has convinced me of one certainty: Attorneys who do not adopt AI will lose the economic competition with attorneys who embrace the coming AI revolution. The capabilities are already impressive. AI can review contracts and identify potential

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july/august 2025