A few years ago, I wrote that the history of legal tech made me believe that the incorporation of AI into legal work would not drive down the costs of legal work or decrease the amount of it needed by clients. Instead, the increased horsepower from incorporating AI into legal work would simply increase the complexity of transactions, litigation and regulatory work that lawyers and clients would engage in, resulting in more, not less, legal spend. I wrote about that in detail here, all the way back in the prehistoric dark ages of AI, all of about three years ago.

More recently, research out of academia has established that my prediction was correct, and has found that dockets show increased litigation work in the average case, corresponding with the time period in which AI has been actively incorporated into legal work.

Bloomberg Law just published an interesting article on the role that AI can play in class action litigation targeting ERISA plans, now rather than in some imagined, AI dominated future. I, along with several other ERISA litigators, talk in the article about how litigators can use AI in class action litigation targeting ERISA plans. I focused on a granular aspect, which is how plaintiffs’ firms can use it to more powerfully target the complaints they file in this area, and how defense lawyers can likewise use it to build out motions to dismiss.

As I explained in the article:

Stephen Rosenberg, head of the Wagner Law Group’s ERISA litigation practice, said plaintiff’s attorneys could also use AI to generate copycat complaints by identifying recent class action complaints and sorting out ones that made it past the motion to dismiss stage.

On the defense side, Rosenberg said the technology can be used to put together a benchmarking defense for a motion to dismiss by identifying fee points and performance points of different options that a client could have selected for an investment menu “without having to laboriously pour through financial data.”