When lawyers started using ChatGPT to write their papers, resulting in hallucinated cites and non-existent quotations, not to mention arguments premised on the inability to grasp basic legal principles like jurisdiction, they got caught, bench-slapped and often sanctioned. I thought they would learn. I was wrong.
I called these lawyers lazy and greedy, unwilling to put in the time needed to craft winning papers, but all too happy to charge clients as if they did for work they didn’t perform. Hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to check their papers written by AI, which could have saved them the humiliation of a judge calling them unpleasant names. And yet, lawyers continued to use AI, including biglaw, charging shamefully high fees for baby lawyers for work that was farmed out to the computer.
Learn from mistakes? Oh no. Then judges started using AI to write their decisions. Perhaps it was their law clerks who did the dirty, and judges were too busy to check the work and signed off on it, even though it was AI slop with the same hallucinations for which they would hand a lazy lawyer their butt. Surely, this teach the legal profession the error of their artificial ways, right? Oh, sweet summer child, hardly. There was still other demands of the system that had yet to aspire to easy-peasy failure. Enter the court reporters.
Although “[t]rial records are rarely if ever perfect,” Ben-Yisrayl v. State, 753 N.E.2d 649, 662 (Ind. 2001), the Transcript in this case is far from the best.
The Transcript contains various types of errors. There are numerous typos that change the meaning of the testimony, question, or objection. See, e.g., Tr. Vol. II at 137:18, 144:10, 147:10; Tr. Vol. III at 6:13. In some instances, witnesses’ and trial attorneys’ names are reported incorrectly. Tr. Vol. II at 220:5; Tr. Vol. III at 142:15–20, 143:15, 162:4–5.
At one point in the Transcript, a motion, presumably made by the State, is attributed to the trial court. Tr. Vol. II at 107–08. At another point, an objection, presumably made by Williams, is attributed to the Bailiff. Tr. Vol. II at 177:15. At yet another point, the State’s closing argument is attributed to the trial court. Tr. Vol. III at 228:1.
The Indiana Court of Appeals in Wiilliams v. State didn’t find the errors in the transcript so bad as to impede the court’s review of the underlying case, which involved the sale of drugs and resulted in a 40-year prison sentence, but it was bad enough to be worthy of mention in the footnotes.
Based upon the types of errors reviewed, it appears that generative artificial intelligence may have assisted with the preparation of this transcript. While AI can improve efficiency and be a productive tool for many professionals, it is incumbent upon those using such systems to proofread and ensure the accuracy of the generated product.
Rather than condemn the use of AI, the court extolled its virtues with a cautionary warning. As with lawyers who use AI to do their work, it cautions court reporters and lawyers to “proofread and ensure the accuracy of the generated product.” In the ordinary course, lawyers are always supposed to proof and correct any errors in transcripts. Many don’t bother. Many have no memory of what exactly was said or by whom, and are incapable of correcting the transcript. And when a new lawyer does the appeal, she would have no ability to know what in the transcript was accurate and what was not. Are they supposed to rely on the trial lawyer, who was just fired and replaced?
For the most part, court reporters are pretty good at their jobs. At least they used to be. Sure, there was errors, but they tended to be very minor and easily corrected if they were material to the case. But court reporting was a lot of work, and typing up a transcript was both an expensive and time-consuming project, necessary for appeal though it may be.
In the future, creating a transcript will be fast and easy because the work won’t be performed by busy fingers, but by AI chatbots. Why should the fact that the next 40 years of your client’s life depends on the accuracy of the transcript concern you? Isn’t “efficiency” and a “productive tool” more important than getting it right?
As was noted years ago as technology sought to wiggle its way into the law, just because it makes things easier does not mean it make things better.
It’s not that lawyers are anti-technology, it’s that they are anti-bullshit.
Remaining anti-bullshit seems prudent, even if generative artificial intelligence persists in pushing lawyers down the path of incompetency.
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AI can help lawyers be more stupid or improve work quality significantly. Ive found more of the latter to be true for my own use, but I take a slightly different approach than merely “write up a brief for me”.
For context, I’ve been using AI both for legal work and personal use. The biggest mistake I see is people (including lawyers but not all agree they are a subset) keep the focus of AI on the answer.
AI used best, at least in my experience, involves narrow focused questions. The answer is not as important as it helps you reframe and refocus your questions. Each session you need to think about training the AI with early prompts before you can get to you actual question.
With this method, I get about 50% of pure junk.
25% is marginally helpful, nothing I cant do myself and faster
But 25% has proven to be extremely useful. For example, on super narrow legal issues that are not common, it will help ID search terms and phrases that are elusive. Twice now its found case law (real cases) that I missed simply because the issue was so narrow and off the beaten path I didnt know how to ask the question for traditional research.
Its really helpful in structing arguments and removing duplicate sections or condensing. Its helpful to double check facts asserted in arguments to make sure they are raised in the facts section.
On occasion, it will give some really good discovery ideas on specific facts
Get it to push back on your own writing, it can act as a proofreader with the right prompts. One of my favorite prompts is “Assume you are a retired judge giving a CLE class to lawyers with less than 5 years experience. You are using this document as an example (use the redacted document). Point out the top 3 things the document does best and the top 3 things it does worst and explain why.”
Unrelated directly to law, is excel. Using excel for personal use and for keeping track of discovery is extremely helpful once you start learning just how much data excel can manage. AI can help write the formulas for cells.
I worked with one matter where we had OCR bank documents, they were imported into a table via AI. AI both identified certain transactions, but even better was when we used AI to help create formulas to allow detailed mathematical review of patterns that were not obvious.
Of course, most wont use AI that way. AI will spit out “See In Re Morse, the classic case of buyers regret”
But if you push back on AI when it gives fake citations, it will explain why it does it too. That helps understand how AI works and helps users understand how to use AI far more efficiently. (Short version is its a word prediction program, and the answer is a balance between speed, accuracy and resources needed to generate a response. Fake citations are a result of its balancing the need for a useful answer with these 3 parameters, and it may result in getting a reward token based upon it concluding there is an 80% chance of the citation actually existing)
AI actually produces more billable hours for real lawyers, or at least for their chatbots. If it’s billable it feeds your family, so go with it!
Just this week, my $20 per month attorney AI made DGCL and MGCL financial information demands on three formerly public corporations whose preferred stock I own, then prepared one pro se filing . Two corps hired outside counsel , and one (to your intense disdain) merely complied with the demand .
Consider all the billable hours assisting government clients in complying with things like properly prepared FOIA demands!
The landscape is endless . I see a renaissance for the legal profession and think you guys need a new legal specialization field.