Troutman Pepper Launches Generative AI Task Force

May 12 2023

Will Gaus, chief innovation officer of the firm, was quoted in the May 10, 2023 Law360 article, “Troutman Pepper Launches Generative AI Task Force.”

“Troutman Pepper has always been on the leading edge of these issues,” he said during an interview Wednesday. “The team is up-to-date on all the legal issues in the implementation of generative AI across industry sectors. Troutman Pepper understands the lengthy journey AI has taken to reach this opportunity of development, and we continue to welcome and actively pursue new opportunities to expand — of course, with appropriate care and due diligence — the use of AI in our firm and the profession of law.”

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“We’re seeing early-use [AI] applications in a number of practices that make sense,” Gaus said. “Our state attorneys general practice is getting a lot of questions. [Intellectual property] practices [have] been getting a lot of artificial intelligence questions for a long time. And obviously, this latest [generative AI] wave is pushing more questions our way.”

“And then, of course, our data privacy practice, which is pretty well-known, is getting AI questions,” he continued. “And then the firm’s e-discovery subsidiary, eMerge, has been using artificial intelligence for years to deliver legal services, and they are getting a number of new questions, too.”

Team members will focus on awareness and education, as well as research and development of AI, Gaus said.

“We want to make sure that, underpinning all of this, we do this in a secure and compliant way,” Gaus said. “We want to make sure we live up to all the ethical and legal obligations that we make our clients in this space, and we want to do it in a pragmatic and thoughtful way.”

The core members of the task force will meet monthly, while its supporting members will get together either in person or virtually multiple times a week depending on the projects the team is working on, he added.