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

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Which judge?

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Judge Nancy Miller (Division I)

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do y’all use AI

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Yes absolutely. My firm has an AI program developed specifically for lawyers. I use it as a research tool into state law that I’m not familiar with. It provides links and citations to the code so that it’s easily verifiable.

I do transactional law, so I don’t have to worry about case hallucination. The biggest benefit is that I can upload recorded diligence calls, have a transcript created, a summary provided, and a short list of suggested supplemental diligence requests.

I've been playing around with Gemini some. My area of admin law has a ton of massive "practice manuals," practice advisories, and easily downloadable decisions. With Gemini you can close the resources it searches so it stays contained to what is uploaded. It has been mostly right in the fact pattern examples I give it spotting issues.

The case management system I am using has the paid ChatGPT integrated into it, which meets the confidentiality requirements for most (all?) states last I heard. Haven't tried to use it yet, but tossed the idea around of seeing if I can tailor consultation notes in a way that it gives me an accurate, coherent strategy note after intake.

That said, I couldn't remember a case name the other day and tried to use ChatGPT quickly to pull it up, and it gave me a completely wrong case, which thankfully cited the one I was looking for.

That depends on the job.

I can see it decimating certain fields, especially ones seen as more elite like regulatory, M/A, transactional, etc.

Personal injury (vicariously via self-driving cars).

Title companies should be worried.

Anything dealing with more static-document and public records searching variables should be worried.

More client-focused and factual-dominant litigation fields should be fine. So say hello to your new divorce and criminal law overlords

So far I've only ever used Copilot to check briefs for typos. It has caught some fairly minor errors - think "a" vs "an," missing end quote, that level. So useful but very marginally so.

I tried feeding in a case scheduling order and asking it to send me calendar entries and it couldn't. I consider that pretty basic, so if it can't handle the easy tasks I'm surely not going to let it try anything more complex.

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Would probably be cheaper to hire a 3L to do basic research and has free access to WL and LN

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This is the way

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Maybe you’re more adept at using AI than me, but I’ve tried many, many times to use ai for these types of use cases and the answers it gives me are rarely correct upon further review. Wrong so often that I pretty much never trust the answer and it just feels like an extra step vs google from 10 years ago.

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I evaluated LLMs for our firm and tried some litigation specific stuff, which is typically where I found issues. Most of the case summaries I saw and compared were fine. I never found any imaginary cases from whole cloth or anything.

The worst examples where were I was told a case said something specific but then when I checked, it was more or less on the subject but didn't say the specific thing. But for us, it's usually an associate going "summarize cases in North Carolina where fair competition was successfully used at summary judgment" and then seeing if those give you a head start vs. going to Lexis or pulling old briefs. Candidly I just don't see how these people are getting completely caught unless they're having AI write briefs or argument sections and not checking them at all.

But as stated, for me, the value is primarily just in small things - some client calls and wants to get a sense of how some tax treatment is going to play into a pending QoE report - I can often use AI to get back to them with a generic "I'm not a tax lawyer but here's what I think we'll hear when we connect with tax counsel." I think if you're broad based corporate or doing outside general counsel type stuff, it's very valuable (and you don't really need to rely on complete accuracy). It just saves you time running down interim answers/getting brushed up on stuff, etc.

You can input medical records and expert reports and it will prepare direct and cross examination questions. About 20% might be garbage, but a lot of the questions are very good.

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This is the way

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I used to use Lexis constantly, but I don’t have to litigate nearly as often as I used to. I had a conversation with Lexis when I came on to the non-profit I’m currently at (Westlaw doesn’t negotiate pricing anymore) to see if they could offer a “building out a brand new very small public facing legal division of a non profit who might need to do legal research a few times a month” rate. The answer was “absolutely!” And was like $200/month. I laughed at them