AI, Esq.
AI is everywhere. The fitness instructor in your Apple Watch, the entertainment concierge presenting your Netflix recommendations, the security of your bank looking for unusual transactions.
Are you ready for AI to be your lawyer?
I read that ChatGPT has passed the bar exam. It’s response when I asked whether that’s true:
Yes, ChatGPT has successfully passed various components of the bar exam in controlled evaluations. In March 2023, OpenAI reported that GPT-4, the model behind ChatGPT, achieved scores that were in the top 10% of test-takers on the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). This includes components like the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) and essay sections.
Of course, it wisely went on to warn me that it isn’t a licensed attorney, and its function is “generating content based on the data it was trained on.” Yep, the disclaimers are always where you find the gold.
Reasons Not to Use AI as Your Lawyer
While AI has shown promise in controlled evaluations—answering multiple choice bar exam questions and even drafting documents, AI lacks the nuance required for real-world legal tasks.
1.Risk of Mistakes
Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is known to “hallucinate”—which means it can make things up. In the context of legal documents, this is a big problem. Miswording a contract or privacy policy could lead to expensive legal consequences. You may end up paying more for a lawyer to review and fix an AI-generated document than if you’d just gone to a lawyer in the first place.
2. Confidentiality Concerns
Another major issue is confidentiality. If you enter sensitive information into an AI platform, there’s a risk it could become public or be exposed to third parties. While some companies might look into building proprietary AI systems, most businesses aren’t there yet.
3. Inability to Read the Room
AI cannot take your temperature. How much are you willing to concede because, if this deal doesn’t close, you won’t be able to make payroll? It will tell you to care about something that you know not to care about because you’ve been working in this industry for 20 years and that issue has literally never come up. We run our businesses in the real world with our unique filters and that is surprisingly difficult to tease out of training data.
Is it Ever Okay to Use AI for Legal Tasks?
Here is how lawyers are told to use AI—treat it like a 1st year associate. Assume it has no depth or breath of experience. Sure, it can do some research and check some templates, but you have to review everything.
Professionally, I don’t use AI for anything that I don’t already generally know the answer to. It is a helpful tool for pulling sources and creating outlines; it can even be a sounding board. But it is not an expert. It is a pool of data without context.
Feel free to reply if you have any questions or thoughts on this topic—I’d love to hear your take!
IP is Fuel 🚀
Erin