AI: What It Can Do for Your Law Firm (And What It Can’t)

AI technology has become all the rage, with everything nowadays seemingly “powered by AI.” The legal industry is no exception. Some people worry that AI will put lawyers out of business. Others—mostly vendors trying to sell us monthly subscriptions to their services—tell us that AI technology will solve all of our problems, eliminating the drudgery of things like discovery or legal research.

Here’s the reality: AI is an exciting and evolving technology that is still in its infancy. It’s useful for some tasks (like searching documents, summarizing material, and organizing data) but—at least for now—is not the miracle product that many people make it out to be. And it certainly won’t be putting lawyers out of business anytime soon.

About the Authors

• Rob Marcereau is a trial attorney and partner at Marcereau Law Group. Rob’s practice focuses on catastrophic injury and severe emotional distress cases, including child injury/abuse, fertility malpractice, and mortuary negligence. (www.theMLGteam.com)

• Benjamin Ikuta is the founding partner at Ikuta Hemesath LLP in Santa Ana, where he concentrates his practice entirely on medical malpractice. He has tried multiple med mal cases to verdict and is proud of his .500 record. (www.ih-llp.com)

ChatGPT: The Engine That Started It All

This seemingly overnight revolution all started with the popularity of ChatGPT, a powerful AI engine that is available to the general public. ChatGPT offers a free version and, for a small amount of money per month, a more robust version that offers more functionality. ChatGPT can analyze and summarize documents, create virtually any image you dream up, or draft documents based on your directives. It’s a pretty remarkable product that is surprisingly cheap—$20 a month.

The dirty little secret that vendors of many AI legal products won’t tell you is this: their “innovative technology” is just ChatGPT with a fancy veneer. They use the exact same technology that you can have for $20 a month, put a user interface overlay on it, and sell it back to you for hundreds of dollars a month! To be fair, some of these products do add valuable services, such as data security (important for medical documents or other private information) or access to legal databases, but, by and large, you are just getting ChatGPT.

The Good

Even the $20 a month you shell out for ChatGPT 4.0 can be enormously helpful. For example, let’s say you have a garden-variety rear-ender where your elderly client complains of back and neck pain. Of course, you should be concerned, or at least aware, if your client has previously complained of back and neck pain to their providers prior to the incident. In mere seconds, ChatGPT can scan thousands of pages of medical records or deposition testimony to locate any mention of such prior pain.

You can even upload an entire deposition transcript into ChatGPT and, in less than 30 seconds, it will spit out a detailed summary of the entire deposition, with reference to page numbers and lines!

Especially now that both Lexis and Westlaw have incorporated AI into their products, ChatGPT can make your pleadings, motions, and demand letters more formal. It can find key demonstratives for use at trial. It can even help craft an opening statement.

AI legal products have tailored AI to fit litigation. Such AI designed for use in litigation is amazing at summarizing documents and picking out bits of information you ask it to look for. It will sift through reams of discovery responses. You can upload a detailed set of building codes, then ask it questions about whether a given condition (e.g. a sidewalk elevation) meets those codes. Given the proper information, AI can write a pretty decent email or letter, or help generate website content or blogs for SEO purposes. It can even power chat features for your website to engage with potential clients.

AI now even has predictive analysis. AI tools can now predict litigation outcomes by analyzing the facts of a case against a vast database of past case law and outcomes. This can help attorneys make more informed decisions about whether to settle or proceed to trial.

AI is now being used by some medical animation companies to create compelling trial demonstratives—at much lower costs to attorneys and their clients.

The Bad

For all its advancements, AI is not without its flaws. The technology’s efficacy is heavily reliant on the quality of input data. If you supply an AI program with inaccurate or insufficient information, you’re not going to get quality results. As the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

AI can be a great time-saving tool, but it won’t do the thinking for you. Given the vast amount of data AI models are trained on, there’s a risk of generating inaccurate or misleading information, especially if the query is ambiguous or the data is outdated.

One of the most notable limitations of AI is its inability to grasp the nuances and subtleties inherent in legal reasoning. Legal arguments often require an understanding of context, interpretation of nuances, and persuasive rhetoric – areas where AI currently falls short. Additionally, AI’s effectiveness diminishes when dealing with novel legal scenarios that lack substantial historical data.

And, of course, ChatGPT cannot try cases or argue motions. Overreliance on AI for legal tasks could lead to a degradation of traditional lawyering skills, such as critical thinking and legal analysis.

The Ugly

AI tools like ChatGPT have been known to generate completely false data. In a recent, infamous case, two New York attorneys were ordered to pay $5,000 fines for submitting legal briefs with fake case citations generated by ChatGPT. This incident highlighted the importance of verifying information provided by AI tools in legal documents. The sanctions were imposed to serve as a deterrent and underscored the ethical and professional responsibilities of lawyers in utilizing AI tools. Using ChatGPT to help clean up your grammar or organize your brief is perfectly reasonable. Relying on ChatGPT to research and write your brief for you is malpractice. The takeaway? If you are using AI to help generate content, make sure to fact check it.

Sloppily or lazily using AI could also lead to ethical violations even beyond relying on a computer to do legal work. If sensitive or privileged information is inputted into the AI for analysis or document drafting, and the AI service stores or processes this data in a way that is not secure, confidential information could be exposed.

And, of course, lawyers are required to provide competent representation to their clients. Relying on AI-generated legal advice or documents without properly verifying their accuracy or applicability could be seen as a failure to meet this obligation.

Conclusion

There is a lot of hype around AI—much of which is justified—but don’t plop down hundreds (or more) a month for products unless you’re sure they’ll be useful to your practice. Ask vendors for a two week (or even better, one month) free trial of their products. Take them for a test drive to see if they’re actually useful to you in everyday practice. AI has its benefits as a support tool in litigation and in our practices, but it cannot replace the critical thinking of an attorney.