As a legal ethics and malpractice litigator, Hilary represents lawyers and firms in disciplinary investigations, prosecutions, malpractice...
Zack Glaser is the Lawyerist Legal Tech Advisor. He’s an attorney, technologist, and blogger.
Stephanie Everett leads the Lawyerist community and Lawyerist Lab. She is the co-author of Lawyerist’s new book...
Published: | January 30, 2025 |
Podcast: | Lawyerist Podcast |
Category: | Legal Technology |
In this conversation, Hillary Gerzhoy discusses the intersection of legal ethics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal profession. She highlights the risks associated with incorporating AI into legal practices, emphasizing the importance of confidentiality and the distinction between open and closed AI systems. The conversation also delves into the supervisory obligations lawyers have when using AI, the challenges of traditional billing models in light of AI efficiencies, and the potential future of AI in making legal services more accessible and affordable.
Special thanks to our sponsor Lawyerist.
Stephanie Everett (00:12):
Hi, I’m Stephanie.
Zack Glaser (00:13):
And I’m Zack. And this is episode 543 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with Hilary Gerzhoy about the ethical implications every lawyer needs to consider when implementing artificial intelligence in their practice.
Stephanie Everett (00:28):
And today’s podcast is brought to you by iManage, so we’ll hear more about them in just a few minutes.
Zack Glaser (00:33):
So speaking of artificial intelligence, Stephanie, when this comes out, I guess it’ll be just a couple days before we are at the Women and AI Summit in Nashville.
Stephanie Everett (00:44):
Yes, I am super excited about this event. As soon as we heard Cat Moon was putting it on over at Vanderbilt University, we were like, yes, please. How do we get involved? And so we are really excited to be the pioneer sponsor of this event as Lawyerist and you and I are going along with another team member, we’re going to be there. It’s cool. It’s not just legal, it’s going to be other industries, but I’m really excited for the conversations to really think about how we’re using AI and yeah, I’m kind of curious how the women’s point of view might change the conversation.
Zack Glaser (01:25):
Yeah, that would be interesting. That would be interesting. I’m excited about this because these are looking at the list of people that are going to be there. These are people that I follow on LinkedIn and before we all quit X and Twitter, I followed them on Twitter and so I guess blue sky at this point, and these are people that I think very highly of their opinion of tech, and so really excited to see how they are, how they’re approaching these things. I don’t always get to go to conferences where I’m like, I’m going to learn a lot of stuff, and so I’m pumped to just be able to soak in a ton of information.
Stephanie Everett (02:13):
And I know some people look, some people are like, ah, ai, are you guys still talking about that? And here’s the newsflash. Yes. And I mean, we have just started using it in such different ways, and so maybe people are like, I just don’t even know what I’m going to do with this tool. It really is. It’s just a tool. Last week I was in a strategy session for our company. We were doing our Q1 planning and we would come up with an idea and sometimes we’d have a discussion about that idea. We would then ask our thought partner, in this case chat, what were we missing? What were we not thinking about? What were our blind spots in our thinking? And it was like a different voice in the room giving us a different perspective and helping us think, helping us, and it would ask us questions that helped us think about our problems differently.
Zack Glaser (03:09):
I love that aspect. A lot of times with artificial intelligence is you describe it as the thought partner. It’s not just a search bar. We’re trying to get this thing to help prod us, make us think about things differently, and a lot of times am kind of have my perspective shifted from something that, so it’s not always just a initial shot at something. Sometimes it helps you dig deeper.
Stephanie Everett (03:44):
Yeah, I mean, I was kind laughing with one of my colleagues, is this going to replace me? Because I do feel, I mean, know everyone’s worried about that, right? As a business coach, I’m like, this is what I do when I go in with a room full of people, but I’d like to think maybe people are hiring me for my brain and my perspective, but my brain is getting better because I’m using these tools and I’m thinking about it differently. So I’m still embracing them. I’m not too scared.
Zack Glaser (04:17):
Oh, no. Well, one of the things that Hillary and I talk about in this episode is one of the initial places that artificial intelligence was implemented in the legal field is eDiscovery E-discovery or discovery didn’t just go away because we brought artificial intelligence capabilities into eDiscovery. People just approach it differently. There are jobs for attorneys who understand the queries and the artificial intelligence and how it works. There are more jobs and different jobs in that sphere than there were initially. And quite frankly, a lot of times more fun jobs a little bit less dirty, dull or dangerous.
Stephanie Everett (05:10):
I like that. And I read in one of my books that I read recently, it talked about how many jobs, if you just think about the internet because the internet scared people this way too. Think about how many internet related jobs exist. I mean, cybersecurity is a whole field of jobs that did not exist when you and I were in college. There was no cybersecurity, not to speak of degrees.
Zack Glaser (05:35):
No, certainly not –
Stephanie Everett (05:37):
The way it is.
Zack Glaser (05:37):
CIPP certifications and areas specific to lawyers even. But yeah, the looms were built and we got more people weaving material. I like to keep in mind that even as potentially, well jobs are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence and jobs in the lowercase J things that we do, but there are things like you’re saying out there that are coming down the pipe that we haven’t even thought of yet. There are new additional jobs and ways of approaching law and ways of approaching your job that it’s fascinating. It’s kind of exciting.
Stephanie Everett (06:22):
Yeah. Well, I’m super excited for your conversation with Hillary because I do think we also have an obligation because of our enhanced and different duties that we have with rules of professional responsibility to make sure we’re approaching these tools in the right way. So let’s check out your conversation with iManage and then we’ll hear Zack’s conversation with Hilary.
Zack Glaser (06:47):
Hey all. And Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist Today, I’m joined by Tonya Wingfield from iManage, a document management solution that is Tanya everywhere. Y’all are all over the place.
Tonya Wingfield (06:59):
We’re getting there.
Zack Glaser (07:03):
We have talked a couple times. First off, thank you for being here and chatting with me about this.
Tonya Wingfield (07:08):
Oh, great.
Zack Glaser (07:09):
Secondly, we’ve talked, I guess this is the third time that we’ve been on talking change management software, change management, because I think that is definitely a thing that document management platforms like iManage are very, very knowledgeable about and really have to deal with constantly, right?
Tonya Wingfield (07:32):
Yes, indeed.
Zack Glaser (07:34):
So of the first two, we talked about how to get people prepped for the change management, figuring out what you need out of your platform, and then the second conversation we had is how do you do it? How do you get buy-in?
Tonya Wingfield (07:48):
Exactly.
Zack Glaser (07:49):
And so today is kind of closing the loop here and talking about how to maintain well, all that good work you did.
Tonya Wingfield (07:59):
Exactly. Thank you, Zack. Yes, because we get so excited once we get across that finish line because the project is done and we’re all high fiving one another timeline. We’ve met the timeline, we’ve met the budget, but afterwards, everyone project team goes away. All of your great champions for the product, they go away and now someone has to maintain this product. And especially when we’re in the cloud environment, we used to plan every five to seven years for change, but in the cloud era, we’re changing every two weeks, sometimes every day. And so somebody has to maintain that change in order to make sure that workflows and operations are intact. And so the one thing that we stress that I manage is to make sure you have a good transition plan. One of the key things with that transition transition plan is identifying your product sponsor or your project sponsor because that is usually the person who’s going to be looking at setting up the schedule to say, okay, we’re going to be getting refreshes of the software every week or every two weeks or every month. How do we make sure that we push those changes out to our users? How do we test them to make sure that there’s nothing else that we have to change in our processes to make sure that users have a smooth transition?
(09:25):
Another key thing that we see a lot that people forget turnover.
(09:30):
We are very fluid environment folks. They’re here today and they’re over there tomorrow.
Zack Glaser (09:37):
Yeah, you’re right. They may not have left the company, but they went somewhere else and you’ve lost that kind of knowledge even. Yeah,
Tonya Wingfield (09:46):
Exactly. Yeah, it could be exactly. It could be with promotions within or it can actually be laterals to other firms. And so you have to remember, especially when that person is in that IT department and they’re the one that’s doing all that maintenance, an upkeep, how are you going to replace these people? So you need to have a transition plan in place as well as a transition plan that will include new hires. So we have to consider that big dynamic. That’s where we usually find where products, the adoption drops usually after 90 days because there’s a transition of employees. So we encourage people, make sure in your transition plan that you figure out how you’re going to do your new hiring, how will you do any maintenance, routine maintenance that’s going to happen, how that’s going to be deployed to your people so that they don’t come in on Monday and then Tuesday they have a whole new desktop and help desk calls go up the sky. So you want to take all that into consideration when you’re setting up that transition plan.
Zack Glaser (10:55):
And that makes a lot of sense from my perspective. I advise people on what technology to implement all the time, and I see people with perfectly working the right technology for their purpose, but they think that other piece, that other competitor is better because they haven’t stayed up to date with the updates because they don’t understand that their product can do that thing and they haven’t followed up. The other is when you do implement these, especially document management, you’re not only implementing the software, you’re implementing a way of working.
Tonya Wingfield (11:39):
Exactly.
Zack Glaser (11:40):
And you have to have somebody that is there that says, no, we do it this way. We put our files in this place. We don’t work on our desktop and then upload it. We work from the cloud or whatever it is. That helps you implement that. Exactly. Is it safe to have one person do that or do we see kind multiple people in that role of that? Well, the change management champion, I guess the person who’s maintaining
Tonya Wingfield (12:17):
It, if your staff allows, the budget allows definitely a lot of time the people that are going to be working around change management would be your change management consultant or manager that you have on staff working in conjunction with your trainers if you have a training department and usually with that first tier level of your help desk working with them.
(12:40):
So it’s a constant, it’s fluid. It’s something that it’s not that we wrote the policy and we put it on a shelf and we wait until we get the next change we used to do in the five to 10 year change or five to seven year. It doesn’t happen like that anymore. Another important thing also about the change that you want to consider because, and we’ve seen this a lot with some of our customers and they’re just like, oh, I never thought about that. But sometimes just saying, this is how we work, that’s one thing, but if there is a change in technology that is going to benefit the company, and that’s the other fluid part of this change management position, you’re constantly seeing what is being done out there in the industry. I know when I was away this weekend at a conference listening to some customers, one of the things that they kept saying was like, Tanya, we need teams integration. And that makes sense because more and more law firms are moving away from their physical phones and they’re using the phone through teams, so it makes sense to start looking at a solution that gives them that desktop where you have your documents, you have your emails, you have your phone through teams.
Zack Glaser (14:03):
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, staying on top of that is the biggest thing After you’ve gotten the changes already made, if people want to learn more about what changes iManage can bring to them or anything like that, they can always go to imanage.com.
Tonya Wingfield (14:23):
Correct.
Zack Glaser (14:23):
Tanya, as always, thank you for your knowledge. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Tonya Wingfield (14:27):
Well, thank you Zack. It’s been great hanging out with you.
Zack Glaser (14:30):
Absolutely. Hope to do it again soon.
Tonya Wingfield (14:32):
Okay.
Hilary Gerzhoy (14:34):
Hi, I am Hilary Gerzhoy and I am a legal ethics and malpractice litigator in dc. My practice involves representing lawyers and law firms in all things ethics related, so anything having to do with the rules of professional or the practice of law. So things like navigating conflicts of interest, navigating disciplinary proceedings, transferring between law firms, lots of ethics issues come up in that context, implementing practices consistent with the ethics rules. And I am vice chair of the DC BAR Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee. So that is the committee in DC that proposes amendments to the rules of professional conduct to ensure that they are reflect the practice of law and reflect evolving changes in the practice of law. I’m also on the A standing committee on ethics and that committee writes Opinions interpreting the Rules of Professional Conduct. And we wrote an opinion that came out last year about artificial intelligence, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about today. I also sit on law three sixty’s legal Ethics advisory board. And so we help give feedback to Law 360 about what are the ethics issues that folks care about. I am on the DC Circuit’s Attorney Grievances and Admissions committee, so that’s a committee appointed by the judges of the DC circuit.
(16:09):
And we hear cases about lawyers who are flagged for admission questions, maybe because they violated one of the rules of professional conduct. They were involved in a criminal case, any reason why a lawyer might be disciplined and that judges might have a question about them continuing to be a member of the DC circuit or whether they should be admitted in the first instance. And lastly, I teach legal ethics and professional responsibility at Georgetown Law School.
Zack Glaser (16:42):
Awesome. I love this. Hillary, thank you for being with me. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and I love your background and your perspective on this because I kind of want to talk about the almost philosophy behind some of our ethical obligations and professional responsibilities. And it sounds like that’s what you get to think. I do a lot. That’s what I big thinking in that professional responsibility sphere. Specifically though I’d like to talk about the incorporation of artificial intelligence kind of into the legal world
(17:21):
And more than just bringing it into our practice, we talk about bringing it into our practices, specifically into our offices and duty of competence and confidentiality and duty to supervise and things like that. But it has larger implications than just our practice. It has implications on clients, it has implications on the law in general. So I guess initially I want to just throw out a big broad question that I’m sure you’re well situated to talk about is what are the risks? What are the big broad risks that we’re thinking about in the legal sphere at large as opposed to just in a lawyer’s practice?
Hilary Gerzhoy (18:08):
Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of how the rules of professional conduct look at lawyer behavior, we are a self-regulating profession. Every jurisdiction has its own version of its rules of professional conduct, and then there is an enforcement mechanism, but it is lawyers on committees like the DC rules committee, for example, that propose changes to the rules that govern us. And then the judges in the highest court in dc, it’s the DC Court of Appeals decide whether or not to accept those rules. And underlying the motivation, which goes to your question, is protecting the public, protecting the integrity of the profession. The idea is that when somebody has the title of lawyer that carries with it certain responsibilities and members of the public lay people make assumptions about lawyers that a lawyer is going to provide advice of a certain nature that a lawyer is going to be truthful, that a lawyer is not going to deceive them, that a lawyer’s not going to steal from them. And there’s lots of jokes about bad behavior by lawyers, but I think the profession and the way that the rules operate is really with an understanding that members of the public actually do look to lawyers and rely on lawyers sort of integral to our justice system. And if lawyers don’t operate consistent with standards that we think are appropriate, the system sort of falls apart.
(19:36):
And with respect to ai, it’s an interesting area because there’s different ways in which the rules of professional conduct change and shift and get interpreted. And one big way is through technology and technological advances. And so the first sort of AI that the legal profession embraced is AI related to document review, which was maybe 15, 20 years ago at this point, which is anybody who litigates cases that have significant documents will know concordance or relativity. Those are platforms that we use that are artificial intelligence. And we over time as a profession got comfortable with it. I think if you had told a lawyer 50 years ago you would be uploading hundreds of thousands of client documents onto a platform that is hosted in the cloud, they would have first of all said, what are you talking about? But also they would’ve been concerned, right?
(20:40):
With the invention of email, there was huge pushback among some lawyers saying, well, we shouldn’t be emailing with our clients. That’s not a secure form of communication. And so that’s just sort of illustrate that over time, I think technological innovation becomes part of everybody’s life and everybody wants to use it and make it be able to gain its benefits and then the profession has to run up behind it and figure out how to put it within the framework that we’ve established, which is the rules of professional conduct and sort of expectations that clients have. And so the big questions with AI are things like how much can you rely on it, right? Because it provides really powerful starting point. I always think of it as it provides an incredibly powerful starting point. It provides an incredibly powerful gut check at the end. It’s the middle part where I think lawyers can’t really rely on it fully. So the big publicity stories that we’ve seen where lawyers submit a brief that has citations to fake cases,
(21:52):
And the reason they did that is because they didn’t check the cases. Now, if you had plugged information into AI and done sort of the first steps that lawyers did in that case, which is help me generate some ideas, right? I have this case for a client, give me some thoughts. Oftentimes AI will come back and give you something you haven’t thought about. So it’s a great place for brainstorming so long as we’re really keeping confidentiality in mind, and I can talk about that in a second. And it’s also a great place at the end, which is there’s AI systems where you can upload, and I’m talking about closed AI systems where you can upload a brief that you’ve written and your opponent’s brief that you’re responding to and say, did I miss an argument? And it can tell you if you missed an argument. That’s an amazing thing to do at the last stage of the game. But I think AI is not in a position yet, and maybe it will be to really replace the hard thinking that lawyers have to do to make sure that they’re zealously and effectively representing their clients with respect to confidentiality.
(22:59):
The distinction is really between open AI and closed universe system.
Zack Glaser (23:04):
Thank you for digging into that. Yeah,
Hilary Gerzhoy (23:08):
So chat, GPT, for example, open system. So it is a violation of 1.6, the confidentiality rule to put client confidential information into chat GBT. Why? Because it’s trained on the information that’s put in, and so you are releasing that information. Now, a closed system like vle for example, is
(23:31):
A product that does really incredible things and it is entirely closed. It doesn’t learn based on the information that you’re putting in. It’s not going to put out information that you’ve put in for a client for somebody else at another law firm for example. But it allows you to do things that are hugely helpful. It allows you to review large numbers of documents to find patterns, tagging things that a lot of junior associates spend a lot of time doing that are sort of right for human error. Looking at a contract and finding all the provisions in a contract that relate to a non-disclosure agreement. And in a 200 page contract, what’s better? If I had to bet is a lawyer better or is AI better at going through a massively long document and identifying any times there’s an inconsistency, I might actually put my money on AI because, and lawyers, it depends on how you’re working a long day.
(24:36):
If you’re tired, not every hour is the freshest hour that you have, but if you’re using a closed system in terms of confidentiality, I don’t really see questions. I don’t see landmines if it truly is a closed system in the way that Westlaw, Lexus closed systems and lawyers rely on them all the time. Open systems absolutely don’t want to be putting in confidential client information, but great for idea generation. When you don’t input that confidential information, the supervisory obligations is really what I was talking about. They can’t abdicate. You can’t abdicate responsibility for the middle portion of doing that legal work
(25:21):
Because you have to supervise it so closely that essentially you’re really doing the meat of the legal analysis because everything that it gives you, you have to check if it’s accurate with respect to things like identifying cases, identifying legal arguments. But do you have with something like document review, what we have talked about in the various committees about what is the standard is coming up with a sample and saying, I’m going to feed this to ai, see what AI gives back to me. I’m going to do it myself and I’m going to compare. And if I get comfortable enough that in my sample size it’s done a good job, there is a point at which I can rely on it for future things. Now the critical issue is telling clients what you’re doing, how you’re relying on it. That’s a 1.4 obligation, your communication obligations with clients,
(26:17):
And then how do you bill for it? That’s another big question that impacts lawyers because the model of billing for lawyers is really has been historically the billable hour. You literally get paid for the time it takes you to do something. You don’t get paid for how good you are. You could charge more per hour based on how good you are, but you get paid for time and effort expended. And many people have criticized that model because it does not incentivize innovation, it doesn’t incentivize efficiency. And so a lot of people have moved to flat fee arrangements. But if you are still in the world that the vast majority of lawyers and law firms are in, which is I bill for my time when AI suddenly makes a task that would’ve taken you two days, two minutes, you can’t build a client for that. So how do we harness the benefits of AI so that clients get that benefit, but also so that lawyers can maintain effective practices as well. And I think that’s a big question going forward about how to navigate that.
Zack Glaser (27:31):
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I like getting into that one, that issue specifically. Certainly it’s something that we talk about on our podcast and our website a lot, is this idea that there is tension between innovating and making money Sometimes. I mean, there shouldn’t be, but there is in the model that we have, and I appreciate that the A BA, like you said, came out and said, we don’t, as lawyers, we don’t get the benefit of that bargain. Our clients do. We cannot bill the two days. In your example, we cannot bill the two days just because it used to take two days. And so that almost exacerbates that tension. I appreciate that the A made that call because saying, yeah, you could bill, it would be professionally to bill for a little more or hedging your bet there might extend out our ability to bill that way. Now it puts the pressure on this
Hilary Gerzhoy (28:51):
Billing model.
(28:53):
I think it really does, and I think it does because I think it has to because the way that the billing, so it’s 1.5 is the rule that governs fees and fees have to be reasonable. So you have to, now I always talk about when people say what is a reasonable fee? There are lawyers who charge $3,000 an hour in DC for example, if you were at the top of your game, is that reasonable? Well, certainly there’s not going to be any bar complaint against that lawyer for charging $3,000 an hour. We think about it as the market has spoken and the market has said that lawyer’s time is worth 3000 an hour. So that’s just to caveat that what is reasonable can cover a broad of billing practices. But I think what it does is puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the legal profession to figure out a different way to make money.
(29:50):
And the answer has to be some. And I think the answer varies dramatically based on where you find yourself if you’re a solo practitioner or a small firm versus if you’re a big firm, if you’re a solo practitioner or a small firm. And a lot of my clients are folks who are small firms and figuring out how to navigate all of this. I think that really encourages the flat fee arrangement, right? Because have clients pay for your expertise and your judgment. That’s what they’re really paying for. At the end of the day, they’re not really paying for your ability to plug something into Westlaw. They’re paying for the fact that you are exercising your judgment that when you plug something into Westlaw and 300 cases come up that you’re identifying what is relevant. You’re distinguishing things in a persuasive way. You are coming up with creative solutions to the problems. You’re identifying a problem that maybe they don’t even know that they have. That’s what they’re paying for. And so that flat fee arrangement works a lot better. Now, I also work to a lot of work with big firms. That becomes much harder when their model for making money and making money at the level that they make money at
(31:06):
Is billing out first year associates at $900 an hour to do document review. I think there is going to be a point that that’s going to be hard to sustain. I was on a panel recently with council for somebody who works in the council’s office at Google, and what he was saying is we don’t even do that anymore. We don’t even hire law firms to do document review anymore because we’ve developed our own proprietary AI
(31:36):
That is so good that why are we going to pay for that? We’re not going to pay $900 an hour if we can do it. And then the other thing that I have heard discuss, which I think is incredibly interesting is one of the things AI is really good at doing is it’s really good at analyzing invoices. So what it can do is in-house counsel will put in invoices for all the law firms that do work for it and say, what is the average it costs for a motion to dismiss? It will shoot out like, okay, we filed 50, there’s been 50 motions to dismiss filed on behalf of the company. It usually costs about $200,000 for a motion to dismiss. Okay? Now when we’re hiring outside counsel, it’s got to be 200,000 or less. We’re not going to pay you to spend more than that. And that puts a lot of pressure on lawyers as well because now there’s these benchmarks that have been put in place, whereas there was much more discretion and sort of fuzziness because anybody knows spend, you could always spend more time making something even better, right?
Zack Glaser (32:44):
Yes.
Hilary Gerzhoy (32:45):
There’s sort of no end. I think that’s one of the things lawyers struggle with is when am I done? It’s not like at the end of writing a brief, somebody says, and now the brief is complete, right? There’s always editing and revising and more research. I think. I don’t know a single lawyer who feels like they’ve ever boiled the ocean and many lawyers wish they could boil the ocean. What if there’s one more case out there that has something super helpful to me and I didn’t find it yet, but are companies going to pay for you to do that? At what level are they going to pay for you to do that? So I think that’s another big question that’s coming out from AI use,
Zack Glaser (33:23):
And I think that goes to even if we as lawyers don’t adjust our billing model ourselves, this is potentially going to be adjusted from our clients, from their perspective. They want a deal. I mean, nobody wants to pay more than something is worth, and typically they’re businesses. So I like how you framed this with the smaller to medium sized law firms. A lot of times they’re potentially going to be able to shift this billing model themselves because they’re saying, okay, well I’m going to create, I’m get more clients because I’m making this simpler for people to understand potentially. But then the larger firms, you have big companies that have the ability to move your billing model for you that are hiring you or even having a law firm that is hiring out another law firm or the legal department, hiring out a law firm, kind of this artificial intelligence, giving them more tools with which to do well to assess your work.
Hilary Gerzhoy (34:34):
And I mean, I think the benefit of all of this is, I would think the hope is that what this can do is free up lawyer time to do more interesting work.
(34:44):
I don’t view it as taking over the jobs that lawyers do. I view it as taking over the pieces of the job that are not as interesting, but that are error prone. And when errors are costly, right? Doing large scale document review, I have yet to meet a lawyer who says, that is my passion. I love doc view review. It’s sort of the joke among lawyers that you start out, if you do litigation as an associate and you just do doc review all day and you plug, you got to bill your eight hours or nine hours to do doc view, but that’s not why you went to law school. You went to law school to be a critical thinker and to engage with interesting legal issues and to be creative. And so the more we can outsource those tasks, ensuring that what we’re giving to our clients is the best work and spend more of our mental energy on the things that at this point AI can’t do quite yet. Maybe we get to a point where it can, but not yet.
(35:50):
Let’s free up time to do that. I mean, there’s a big access to justice argument that folks have made. I haven’t really seen it come to fruition. But the idea is that this will hopefully revolutionize the practice and make legal services a lot cheaper because legal services are incredibly expensive. And for a country where we rely on the justice system that we have and needing representation and how differently situated people have massively different outcomes based on whether or not they can have representation, they can afford representation, making it cheaper. And I don’t think we’ve seen how that has happened yet. But I think the hope is that if we can make some of these tasks be tasks that can be done much more inexpensively, then more people can hire lawyers. And if we think more people can hire lawyers, that’s generally good for everyone. Because
(36:48):
If you have a lawyer, I mean, we have all done cases where you’ve done a pro bono case and you’ve represented somebody who otherwise wouldn’t have counsel. And to just sort of see firsthand the fact that you are a lawyer standing next to them, helping them navigate what is, we all went to law school for three years. It is a complicated legal system that we exist in. And so having someone who just, even if they don’t know that particular area of law, they’ve gone to law school and they’ve thought about these, about how the system operates, that’s a better thing. So that’s the sort of hope I think, that some people have for what AI is going to do for the profession. But that I think remains to be seen
Zack Glaser (37:28):
It, and we will keep our fingers crossed. Hopefully that’s the direction we go. Okay. Well actually, we’ve covered a ton of stuff, Hilary. I really appreciate it. We do need to wrap up a little bit. What would be a piece of advice, a simple piece of advice that you would give to attorneys that are concerned about bringing artificial intelligence in their office? What would you tell them?
Hilary Gerzhoy (37:58):
I would say find some closed systems and play around with them. Because what I think you will find is that it’s a hugely powerful tool that will let you be a better lawyer. It will help you be a better lawyer. And so making sure that you are mindful of confidentiality. We don’t want to be using chat GPT as our solution when we’re inputting client information. But based on your practice, do a little bit of research about what are the best closed systems for the type of practice that you do, and see if you can get a free trial and see what it looks like. Because I’ve played with a lot of these systems and it’s incredibly powerful, right? There’s areas in which it does a terrible job, and the answer was totally wrong and it didn’t know what it was talking about. But there are other areas where it gives new ideas or it creates massive efficiencies. But make sure when you use it that you are checking both as a practical matter, does this even make sense? Right? Does this answer even make sense? But also
Zack Glaser (39:07):
To pass a sniff test. Yeah,
Hilary Gerzhoy (39:08):
Exactly. But also what you’re relying, the sources that you’re relying on that do they say what it is purporting that it says, that’s the big thing that trips people up. And there I think will come a time where there’s an expectation that lawyers are using ai. So I think getting ahead of that by seeing how you can use it now in a way that can enhance your practice, but be cognizant of staying mindful of what the ethics rules say. That would be my guidance.
Zack Glaser (39:43):
I think that’s fantastic advice. Grab a closed system that’s related to what you do. Play around with it, see how powerful it is, but also see what it’s lacking as well. But like you said, if it’s a closed system, then we’re not concerned. We don’t have an issue with confidentiality and all that. Well, Hillary, I really appreciate you being here and talking with me about this. Thank you very much.
Hilary Gerzhoy (40:09):
Yep. Thanks so much for having me on.
Zack Glaser (40:11):
Awesome.
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Lawyerist Podcast |
The Lawyerist Podcast is a weekly show about lawyering and law practice hosted by Stephanie Everett.