The deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) aligns with Houthoff’s innovative ambitions. It allows us to adapt to our clients’ changing legal needs and to serve their interests even better, now and going forward. It also underpins our commitment to constantly explore even smarter and more efficient ways of working. Of course, in doing so, we ensure data security and compliance with our ethical standards and legal obligations. This statement explains our approach in more detail.
Our AI applications
We currently use several AI tools, which support our experts and staff as follows:
- File analysis and document review: AI structures large amounts of information, identifies relevant passages, extracts data points, and recognises inconsistencies and patterns.
- Text generation and standardisation: AI assists in drafting and enriching documents, enabling more effective use of internal know-how.
- Translations: AI delivers fast and accurate translations of texts.
- Summaries: AI summarises documents and quickly conveys their key points.
- Legal research: AI identifies relevant sources and case law to support our advice.
- Automation of routine tasks: AI can automate routine tasks, freeing up more time for high-value, complex work where human input remains essential.
Our key safeguards
We apply strict safeguards when deploying AI:
- Confidentiality and data security: use is restricted to Houthoff-licensed AI tools, ensuring that data remain within a closed and secured digital environment (in the European Economic Area) and are not used to train AI models.
- Human autonomy: AI supports but never replaces our experts’ independent judgement. Human involvement is the norm and is ensured by having a ‘human in the loop’ (for tasks or work products) or a ‘human on the loop’ (for automated processes). Our experts remain ultimately responsible for the work processes and final products at all times.
- Quality: AI contributes to quality improvements and will never compromise our target quality level.
- Ethics and sustainability: we are mindful of the ethical dimensions and social impact of AI. This is reflected in our selection criteria and rules of conduct.
- Transparency: we are open about our AI use and are happy to answer any questions in that regard. However, for confidentiality reasons, we do not allow audits of our applications.
- Governance and risk management: our procurement and use of AI tools is governed by a robust governance framework. This involves performing vendor assessments (including AIIA, DPIA and IT security assessments), applying internal rules of conduct based on the ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle, facilitating mandatory training and clear instructions to promote AI literacy, monitoring and complying with laws and regulations, and implementing sound incident management.
Working together on innovation
We regard AI not just as a technology, but as an opportunity to develop new ways of collaborating with our clients and other partners. Every contribution counts – together, we create solutions that deliver added value.
We are still in a largely exploratory phase, gaining experience with AI while building the necessary skills and knowledge. This requires the commitment and development of everyone at Houthoff.
Our conviction
We believe in the power of ‘collaborative intelligence’, which combines human qualities (such as creativity, empathy, ethical thinking and contextual understanding) and AI qualities (such as speed, scalability, pattern recognition and data analysis) to accomplish more than would be possible alone.
AI contributes to what really matters: Making our clients and people successful by working collaboratively on key legal solutions for businesses moving forward.
If you have any questions, please contact Steven ter Horst, Head of Innovation ([email protected]).
