Lawyers are losing more than just their cases for cutting corners with AI. In September, a California attorney was fined $10,000 for a court filing riddled with fake quotations conjured up by Chat GPT. Since AI chatbots started gaining traction in 2023, there have been over 500 similar cases where lawyers were reprimanded and fined for providing fake, AI generated “facts” and citations, leading to those cases’ dismissal.
These outcomes are not just devastating to the lawyers involved, but also serve as a wake-up call about the promise and peril of using AI in the legal profession. Firms must now understand how AI should be utilized to achieve better outcomes while avoiding AI’s shortcomings.
The question about whether AI “belongs” in law is moot. Generative AI is here. It is cheap, widely available, and increasingly prevalent in its use both in law and elsewhere. Torrents of legal and regulatory filings each day make it nearly impossible to track policy changes that matter most. Many firms already address this problem with AI tools that process documents, research cases, and assist drafting. Databases such as LexisNexis, Policy Pulse, and Westlaw use machine learning, revolutionizing how many firms serve clients, saving money and countless hours.
The question that remains is how to use AI responsibly.
Unfortunately, many businesses developing AI tools still follow the “move fast and break things” ethos that earlier software development companies evangelized. When these tools are meant to inform human decisions on legal outcomes, breaking things is not an option. There are three guidelines to follow for the responsible use of AI tools by legal and regulatory actors: The tool must be purpose driven, be able to maintain trust, and demonstrably improve outcomes."
Purpose driven AI tools must be specialized for their task. Policy Pulse, LexisNexis, and Westlaw are designed to search for documents in the legal field. Chat GPT is not, with data training cutoffs and inaccurate sources making the output a gamble. Using generic AI tools as an aid for legal and regulatory work is like using a Swiss army knife for surgery--technically possible, but never advisable.
For an AI tool to maintain trust, it must also defeat the hallucination problem. Practitioners must be able to trust that their tools are not making things up that sound correct but are factually tenuous at best. Tools that limit their libraries solely to primary sources and provide direct page references eliminate the risk of faulty citations.
To provide demonstrably better outcomes, legal AI tools are most successful when applied to problems that are high cost, labor-intensive pursuits that do not directly involve analysis of the law itself. “As a solo practitioner, Policy Pulse has been a game changer for my ability to stay on top of the regulatory landscape," said Rachelle Chong, a former CPUC commissioner and a regulatory lawyer. For clients, this means faster, cheaper, and more accurate legal services, and for lawyers it is more time spent working directly on client issues.
When regulators, policymakers, and judges can process information faster and more accurately, they make better, more informed decisions. When firms integrate specialized AI as a tool in their arsenal, those with the best adoption will dominate, providing more nuanced analyses in less time.
Robot lawyers are not an immediate threat to the legal profession. The choice is not between AI and human decision-makers, but between smart integration and dangerous shortcuts. Law firms and policy-makers must start to use narrow, specialized AI tools rather than general chatbots, which could cost a career or create bad law. Clients should demand transparency about the use of AI in legal work being done for them. The lawyers who thrive in the AI age will not be those who eschew the technology altogether, they will be those who master it responsibly.
Brian Goldman is an energy regulatory, policy, and compliance advocate, and is the Principal at Goldman Energy Consulting, LLC.
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