Miriam Kim

San Francisco
With more than two decades of complex civil litigation and intellectual property law experience with a particular emphasis on technologies that enhance daily life, Miriam Kim's journey into the realm of artificial intelligence began around 2016, driven by her clients' innovations in AI and the necessary hardware.
Kim said her attraction to these matters stems from her passion for learning about disruptive technologies and her desire to tackle intricate issues at the nexus of technology and law, including trade secrets, false advertising, products liability and unfair competition.
As a co-chair of Munger, Tolles & Olson's Generative AI Task Force, Kim leverages her extensive tech litigation experience to forge new models that utilize generative AI to elevate the quality of legal services and broaden access to justice.
Her commitment to innovation in the legal field is further exemplified by her fellowship at Berkeley Law, where she collaborated with Professor Colleen Chien on a pioneering field study. This study provided 91 legal aid lawyers with paid AI tools -- ChatGPT, CoCounsel, and Gavel -- to investigate how generative AI could help bridge the justice gap.
"We found that 90% of legal aid professionals participating in the study reported increased productivity in performing various tasks," Kim said. "Despite the risks of generative AI, lawyers found ways to use the tools to save time and improve the quality of legal services by focusing on lower-risk tasks like summarizing long documents, brainstorming, and drafting documents without legal citations."
In addition, Kim said one of the surprising obstacles in the study on generative AI and legal aid was the gender disparity in the organic adoption of AI. Before the pilot, women were only one-third as likely as men to use AI tools, she said.
"This gender gap is especially noteworthy because women make up over 75% of the legal aid workforce," Kim said. "By the end of the study, the gender gap was effectively closed, with women having positive results using the AI tools as much as men."
Kim also did pro bono with attorneys for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco on generative AI and trained them to develop a new model for using generative AI tools in one-hour appointments at the GLIDE Unconditional Legal Clinic in San Francisco.
"With client consent, we found ways to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard (now Gemini) to boost efficiency and provide more in-depth legal support, with tasks such as summarizing large volumes of documents on the spot and quickly preparing customized letters or other work product that previously would have been impossible to generate during the appointment," Kim said. "I am hopeful that other legal clinics and pro bono attorneys can adopt similar strategies to improve the quality of legal services provided to pro bono clients.