re: Lawyers of the OT, do y’all use AI?

Yes, but

- A lot of it is for ancillary stuff - double checking a calculation of some sort, figuring out a common practice/situation somewhere I'm unfamiliar with (another JXN, country).

- Usually I'm either starting from scratch and it's just a starting point, or I know a good bit and I'm double checking or trying to see if AI can open some new angles. I never rely solely on AI.

- It's helpful for me to use AI to get a base understanding of things that are ancillary to my practice and which arise but which I'm not an expert in (ie, specific tax/regulatory/similar issues). Which I wouldn't use to advise a client, but more so to have an understanding of an issue I know is going to be a topic addressed by tax counsel on a deal call, etc.

No- seen people burned by judges for citing fake cases etc
frick that

As a general counsel in a tech company with limited resources and headcount, it’s been a lifesaver. I use it how I would abuse a kid right out of law school making $60k.

“Hey we’re doing a partnership deal with XYZ Corp. in Q4 and we need an MOU drafted by next week. Nah we don’t have any of the commercials nailed down, we just need to get something signed!” First move is to an AI companion to put together a skeletal template.

My AR team calls me and says these 5 clients are between 68-110 days past due on their invoices and they want to send a notice of material breach + suspension? ChatGPT can put together a letter in 10 seconds which I can then just put each client’s name and notice contact on, sign it, ship it.

Would I ever give it confidential/proprietary information or PII? No.

Would I ever rely on it for legal research, case citation etc.? frick no. Not without independently verifying its conclusions on my own…and potentially with an outside specialist firm if budget allows.

ETA: I recently implemented a CLM system so that I could dump all our contracts in, have the native AI tool run and pull meta data for reports for my board/PE group. Their implementation people told me, “the more you feed it, the more it’ll learn!” So we dumped about 160,000 contracts in, and the AI did a fricking horrendous job of even just pulling out the party names. I was so disappointed we wasted money on that shite.

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I’ll pop a basic legal question into google every now and then and the AI generated answer is wrong all the damn time. It’s biased to give you what it thinks you want to hear and nearly every source it cites says something other than what the AI generated summary says.

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This. My biggest problem is similar. I can usually not nail down a proper cite for what AI is telling me from the list of resources it cites as authority for its conclusion.

No.

Not at all.

I don't even let clerks do work for me.

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Do you find the most amazing part: that the lawyer claimed it was okay to use Google and ChatGPT and Copilot to check each other, instead of Westlaw or Lexis or even Fastcase? Or that she doubled down on things after being questioned? Or what?

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I enjoyed her argument attacking defense counsel’s billing in connection with the motion. “Your honor, it should have only taken three minutes to put the citations into google, not 7.3 hours!”

I encourage her to take up the appeal as she suggested.

Lawyer LinkedIn has been pretty quiet about using it for litigation after a long period of “use AI or you’re a dinosaur!!1”. Too many dummies are getting popped with fake cites. I haven’t read into it much but I’d imagine there are privilege concerns about dumping sensitive records into these apps too.

I'm more of a Google / AI Physician

I can diagnose anything in just a few clicks

Only as a basic, frontline search. “Find me all of the statutes that reference ABC”. “Find me AG opinions on XYZ admin issue.” Saves me a few minutes in gathering where I want to start, but I utterly ignore what it claims those statutes or opinions say, as it’s practically always wrong