Lawyers are slow to change. One reason for the fight against change is that lawyers are trained to identify risks and AI seems full of risk, including "hallucinations," in which AI tools simply make up facts. There was the recent, much publicized case where a lawyer blindly used ChatGPT to draft a brief and the program completely fabricated cases and case citations. This case and other examples appear to be prompting action from the courts. For example, Judge Starr of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a standing order in April requiring lawyers to certify that generative AI tools were not used to assist with drafting any papers filed with the court. Other courts have followed.
Despite this natural aversion to change, the legal world does change.
Gone are beautiful law libraries full of hard bound case reports. The cases that were housed in impressive tomes are now computerized and can be found and summarized faster than ever.
Gone are the litigation "war rooms" full of hundreds of boxes of discovery. Now, third party services compile and store data electronically for associates to review from anywhere using a computer rather than sitting for days and weeks in a windowless room.
Gone are "runs" to the post office, courthouse, or a shipping company like FedEx in order to make a filing or send an important document to a client, opponent, or the government.
Detractors pointed to potential problems with all of these advancements. However, their advantages overcame the possible risks. Likewise, the legal world will find that AI's advantages provide efficiencies and improvements unparalleled in the past. Do there need to be protections? Absolutely.
Will there continue to be lawyers with physical libraries, paper discovery, and daily trips to the post office? Yes, there will be some... probably just as many as the lawyers not using AI in the future.
Fortunately, there are some forward-thinking members of the legal profession who are accepting the inevitability of rapid technological change and are embracing rather than fighting the adoption of generative AI into our profession. In January, Dean Andrew Perlman of Suffolk University Law School suggested that law school students should be taught how to use generative AI as one of the many useful tools in their legal research and writing arsenal.
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