We have been speaking with many lawyers and law students about using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. We are struck by the fact that many of them have not been experimenting much, if at all, with the tools that are available to them – although many acknowledge that their clients are increasingly integrating generative AI into their businesses. We have been integrating a lot of these tools into our own professional lives, and here are some tips to help lawyers and law students get comfortable with AI tools that can help them, in big ways and small, with their job.
Put it on Your Home Screen
Put your preferred AI app (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) onto your phone’s home screen and be sure to allow it to access your phone’s microphone. You will be surprised by how often you get the urge to ask the app slightly complex questions that a basic web search would not answer. (Hat tip to one of our kids for this idea.)
Start with the Familiar
Trusting the output of an AI tool without having the ability to verify its accuracy is okay if you are choosing a movie to stream tonight. It is not okay if you are using it to provide legal advice to a client. To get comfortable with AI tools, start using it for tasks that you have experience executing and reviewing. One simple way to start: explain a familiar task to the AI tool and ask it for guidance on how you can use it to complete the task.
As you use AI tools in newer areas, you want to review the cited sources in the AI output to confirm that you agree with the AI model’s interpretation of them. Sometimes they are plain wrong, sometimes the AI model misinterprets the cited documents, and sometimes those documents are out-of-date.
When the stakes are greater than your personal entertainment, you need to do a lot of due diligence before you adopt an AI tool’s findings.
Use Multiple Tools
Different AI models are built on different training documents and have different algorithms that they apply to those documents. There is nothing more edifying than running the same queries through a few general AI models and a few specialized ones (like those geared to lawyers, in particular). You will see a range of answers, from non-answers to highly specialized and accurate ones. You will start to become a more sophisticated consumer of the different models, understanding each of their strengths and limitations.
Tell It Your Needs
Most AI tools will tailor their responses to your preferences. In some cases, we created a prompt to instruct the AI tool that responses should be of the type that a lawyer would like to receive—providing sources, explaining its analytical steps, and what it did and did not consider. The AI tool responded that it would be precise, answer “above a lay level,” and “be candid about uncertainty.” This has improved its answers and had the side effect of reducing sycophantic language (“That is a very good question!”).
Use it for Your Pain Points
We all have some routine tasks that we find irritating. They are usually the ones we procrastinate on. For some, it is preparing slide decks. For others, it is drafting certain kinds of emails (unpaid bills, anyone?). Just getting a first draft from the AI tool often helps you to finish the work up. But for some tasks, like preparing presentation slide decks, you can save hours and hours of your time.
We have experimented with both general AI tools and those that specialize in slide deck preparation. They have pros and cons, but are generally very helpful. In all these cases, the AI tool’s time savings are in large part due to the fact that the AI tool is optimizing a task that you are capable of doing yourself. You are able to quickly verify and edit the output.
However, if you were asking the tool to analyze a topic with which you are unfamiliar, or perform a task that you’ve never done before—if you’re learning from scratch—you will still need to go through the painstaking process of checking sources and confirming output.
Play in Vaults
One game-changing use of AI tools is to upload documents to a secure location in the cloud (sometimes referred to as a “vault”) and hone the tool’s focus on only those documents. A transactional lawyer can upload hundreds of documents and quickly identify commonly appearing terms for comparison or inconsistencies among them. A litigator can upload thousands of pages of litigation documents and create a draft chronology of events. Again, the output cannot be taken at face value due to the functional limitations of these tools, but it can provide an extraordinary first draft that can then be verified and edited to the form you prefer. This can be a game-changing use of AI for lawyers, as long as you have verified the vault’s security in advance.
Use it as a Second Set of Eyes
This is a great and scalable tip for those who are skeptical of AI tools. After you have completed a written task, ask an AI tool to critique for clarity, coherence, and accuracy. Even an experienced attorney will get at least a couple of suggestions that will ring true. And of course, you can reject all of the suggestions that you disagree with. This is a great way to see if an AI tool can provide you with real value with very little investment of your time.
Along the same lines, for more advanced experimentation, you can use the AI tool to issue spot and offer counterarguments to your work to complement your own analysis. Again, this is very low stakes because you can reject anything you find wrong-headed or irrelevant. Of course, you need to be careful about sharing privileged information (see vault security above).
Preserve Confidentiality
We have spent more time than many of you would like looking at the Terms of Use of the AI tools we have used. Except for certain tools that are developed for legal work in particular, we believe that the attorney-client privilege can be compromised when using many AI tools because of how the tools use your input information.
We have had students and clients who wanted to use AI transcription tools to compile meeting notes. We have advised them that confidential information can be compromised by such tools and that we do not use them in our practice, at least at this time.
If you begin to use a tool with client-identifying information, be sure to confirm that you are complying with your professional responsibilities to preserve client confidences.
Don’t get lazy!
We all read the headlines about lawyers who use AI to draft legal documents and do not check to confirm that the work product is correct. Those lawyers rightfully face professional discipline and reputational consequences. We can all say that we would never do that, but a new term has arisen to describe an unthinking reliance on AI: “cognitive offloading.” This offloading occurs when we reduce our own deep research and thinking because of an unhealthy reliance on AI tools.
Every time we complete a substantive task with AI, we need to ask if we have thought through the task as fully as we would have if we did it without the tool. If the answer is no, we need to dig into it again. Cognitive offloading is a particular concern for law students and younger generations of lawyers, who have grown up with technology and tend to be more comfortable using AI tools – and therefore more susceptible to this unthinking reliance.
Conclusion
From our discussions with lawyers in private practice, it is clear that AI tools are being used in the ways we have mentioned above. No doubt, more specialized tools are in development. It’s clear that AI will transform the practice of law in the coming years. Those who are new to AI can use these pointers to begin exploring how AI works. We think they can amplify their effectiveness to the benefit of their clients and themselves, so long as the risks that AI tools pose are thoughtfully addressed.
