Top 50 Fintech, TMT & AI Lawyers 2024
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Lawyers jobs may be threatened by AI as it progresses into life, but for now work is abundant as governments, the law, and the public seek to digest this tool. One estimate (from Charles Kerrigan at CMS) said businesses will spend c£7bn on AI compliance over the next few years.
A big development was, on 13 March 2024, the European Parliament adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). It is considered to be the world’s first comprehensive horizontal legal framework for AI. It provides for EU-wide rules on data quality, transparency, human oversight and accountability. The AI Act categorizes AI systems based on four tiered risk levels: unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal or no risk. As risks associated with a particular category of system rises, stricter rules apply. Models that violate fundamental EU rights are banned.
Data quality is one of the issues being foreseen as a problem with “clean rooms” for data input needed. The primary concern of a data clean room is keeping user data isolated and private something that has been a big issue previously.
AI’s benefits will be in making advancements and enhancing the speed of decisions in, for instance, medicine, however the ‘Magnificent 7’, which includes Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, are driving all fintech investment returns with Nvidia taking “all the money” with $60bn in revenue.
The race is on for market share with the prospect of enterprise licences coming to a Microsoft screen near you. Microsoft’s AI products include Cortana (virtual assistant), Azure AI (cloud-based AI services), and various AI-powered features in Microsoft Office applications and Dynamics 365.
Investment managers also see growth in predictive AI for pricing and products which is machine learning to identify patterns in past events and make predictions about future events. So far, the insurance industry has done well with this, predicting weather patterns and checking insurance claims.
However big tech has government “all over it.” The EU’s biggest fine was 4.3 billion euros ordered against Google for abusing the dominant position of its Android mobile operating system to promote Google’s search engine. With multiple retrospective problems seen with tech operators, their forward progress will require more careful plotting in future. With that, a lawyer by their side would seem a sensible and necessary investment, despite the threat AI might represent to legal jobs in the future.