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hello everybody I'm Samantha hope and I'm the head of emerging Talent at Sho Smiths I'm thrilled to be discussing with you a topic today which is fundamentally changing the legal world and that is generative AI or gen AI um and also how that's impacting training contract applications we chose not to ban the use of gen AI in application forms for training contracts it ties in wholly with our strategy as a forward-thinking Innovative firm in our experience of training contract applications in our most recent recruitment round which was just at the beginning of this year we found that one in three applicants were using geni as part of their application form so instead of fighting the inevitable we're really embracing it and using it as a unique selling point for junior lawyers to join the industry a few months ago we published guidance for the training contract applicants so that we can manage their expectations about how they could or shouldn't use geni and as part of their application form as well as embracing its use throughout the application form we went one step further and we introduced a question that was specific to the use of gen AI we started the question by setting the scene about how the firm uses Ai and what our expectation was the question asked how do you expect to use generative AI tools to enhance your Effectiveness as a solicitor in the future if you have you may also choose to include specific examples of how you've UTI Iz generative AI to elevate part of your application to shith in this answer to help candidates really understand what we wanted from them we shared additional guidance in our careers blog on Instagram we made reals and we also hosted a few Q&A sessions as well at the moment we're working with Microsoft on their co-pilot program and that's an agnostic AI system which we can use across the whole business so for me in my role I use it to help writing social media posts or up dates for LinkedIn I might use it to summarize a teams call or start a presentation for me what I want to be really clear about though is that we don't use AI to provide legal advice but it can be used to provide efficiencies when doing legal research or drafting for example I'm also not using AI to screen any job applications all of our applications are still seen reviewed and assessed by the humanum ey some of those tasks I just mentioned sound like admin level work and I know there's some concerns about geni taking away Junior lawyer positions but I don't think that's the case at all actually I think that it's going to free up valuable time taking away the tedious tasks from Junior lawyers and letting them have exposure to more complex skills and develop their strengths in other areas how many contracts does a lawyer need to review before they're an expert in reviewing contracts they need to have less time reviewing the contracts more time negotiating them and I think AI will really allow them to do this so looking at those skills as a skill of the future that's why we're introducing it into our job applications at this stage this really is just the beginning and as a early careers recruiter in this world I think we need to be really adaptable to move with the times and stay on top of current AI Trends just today I heard about a new feature in the new build of chat GPT that's going to give real life audio responses in assessments that's a whole new world of thinking when it comes to gen I think geni really does offer immense potential to both the candidates and us as law firms but it is only one piece of the puzzle when we're assessing skills and strengths it's important that we don't become blindsided by gen AI you might be wondering how easy it is to spot the use of gen AI in applications or if there's some software that will do it for us at the moment even gen AI itself can't detect its own answer aners in applications and where it has been used to do so it's been inaccurate so no there's no quick answer here but there are some really obvious signs that we identified where people had used gen AI in a quite lazy copy and paste style way obvious examples were where paragraphs started with words like moreover and additionally but it was repeated again and again throughout the paragraphs that followed many AI generated answers didn't give real depth answers could be very wordy and Waffle although I think you'll agree that some are before the use of gen AI as well using Americanized spellings we're seeing this way more than we ever used to and this is because gen AI defaults to this whether you choose to include AI as part of your job application process or not one thing is absolutely crucial let candidates know where you stand on the issue and what it means to you as a law firm and how it feeds into your wider business strategy as well as articles reals on Instagram and information can you upskill candidates using webinars or having a specific speaker at an Insight evening the legal field is no stranger to Innovation once we used to work of paper files and typewriters but look at us now so I'll leave you with my closing question are you team Embrace AI or team ban AI in job applications