Linklaters last night (2 December) hosted the launch of a report by She Breaks the Law (SBTL) and Next 100 Years, described as the start of a legal sector movement to ensure that women’s voices are heard in the new Gen AI world order.
The evening was opened by Linklaters’ senior partner Aedamar Comiskey, who pointed out that the report survey shows that women are universally lacking confidence and reluctant to use Gen AI, which risks creating a knowledge gap or “vicious circle” given the pace of change.
SBTL is a global community of women professionals, and speaking at the event, CMO Helen Burness and director Lucie Allen said that we are already seeing an absence of women in power in AI and there is an “urgent need to ensure our voices are heard.”
One of the biggest issues is the inherent bias in large language models. The report cites an instance in which a female lawyer could only get the tone of an email right when she told it to ‘write like a man’. Hosting a panel of female leaders, Linklaters’ partner and Gen AI chair Shilpa Bhandarkar asked Fiona Phillips, head of legal – digital information and data at UBS, if she herself had experienced bias. Phillips said: “Sadly lots. I was giving training on the AI Act to a group engineers.
To persuade them that law can be fun we played a game. I wanted a picture of ‘a lawyer’ having fun. Every picture was of a man. I said, ‘show me a female lawyer’ and was given a very sexualised female in a mini skirt. LLMs are not trained on representative data. What does that mean for how they are being embedded in society?”
Christina Blacklaws, former president of the Law Society of England and Wales, who is chair of legaltech startup body LawTechUK, pointed out on the panel that just 14% of scale ups and startups are female founded, commenting: “If you don’t have diversity in the room, you can’t expect diverse outcomes.”
Fellow panelist Dana Denis-Smith, founder of the Next 100 Years and also flexible legal work provider Obelisk Support, urged women to help train the AI by engaging with the likes of ChatGPT. With her daughter, Denis-Smith asked ChatGPT to name the world’s greatest leaders, all of which were reported to men. “We asked ‘where are the women?’” Denis-Smith said. “It depends on us to continue to train it. If we don’t call it out, it won’t learn.”
Denis-Smith also pointed out that there is a danger in perpetuating historic messages around women’s role in developing tech. “Why are we telling them they have to code?” she asked. “I’m encouraging my child to use Gen AI and women need encouragement; if a kid can do it, women can do it.”
‘Male ally’ Marc Harvey, a Linklaters litigation partner and Gen AI steering committee co-chair who was on the panel, observed that the steering committee is made up mostly of women, and that of the 4,000 users and 200,000 prompts a month of the firms chatbot Laila, most are from women. “It is vital that people understand how big this is and that no-one is left behind,” he said. What is needed, Harvey suggested, is for firms to create the time to use new technology, to build it into the substance of the day, and to systematise and make it part of the promotion process that everyone has skills in AI.
Overall, the panel agreed, it is important to learn from past lessons, commenting: “We’ve been left behind many times and need to learn the lessons from history,” said Bhandarkar.
What is required is policy from government, not just tech companies, and all of us need to play our part. It would be great to hear from bodies such The Law Society and City of London Law Society as to what they have planned in this space.
