AI and the Practice of Law: Insights for Attorneys and Paralegals

Episode Notes

Transcript

Rocky Dhir:

Welcome to the State Bar of Texas podcast, your monthly source for conversations and curated content to improve your law practice with your host, Rocky Dhir

Rocky Dhir:

Hi, and welcome to the State Bar of Texas Podcast. Worked smarter, not harder. Remember that phrase as lawyers, that’s a tough phrase to unpack. I mean, sure, we can try to work smarter, but then in law school we were always told that to win, you got to outwork your opponent. And if you bill by the hour, then the harder and longer you work the more money you make, right? I recall a keynote speech given that the adaptable lawyer track of the state bar annual meeting many years ago, the speaker warned us as lawyers that the business community saw the inefficiencies in our way of working, and that instead of working with us to make things more efficient, they would work around us, circumvent us. She cautioned us that there will come a day when we as lawyers will be forced to completely rethink how we do business.

Perhaps that day is today. By now, you’ve heard of chat, GPT, it’s everywhere. And how artificial intelligence is being used for everything from processing loan applications to helping comedians write their jokes. I can actually attest to the comedians thing. I perform standup comedy in my free time, and I know a number of comedians who have actually used chat GPT to help them come up with joke ideas or joke structures, or at least get them a rough draft of a set. But comedy is far different from the law. I mean, making people laugh at your gibberish is one thing, but that’s not nearly as hard as being a comedian. Come on, I had to throw that in. But are lawyers truly entering a brave new world where AI will change how we work? Was that keynote speaker correct when she said that our ways of doing business will change to delve into this a bit more deeply?

We have some special guests today, folks, you might not have expected. But then again, AI will require us to think differently than we ever did. First we have Megan Goor- Peters the senior Paralegal and property manager at the Brender Law Firm in Fort Worth. She’s the current representative of the Paralegal Division of the Texas Bar College, and she’s a member of the state bar’s task force for responsible AI in the law. Now, some of you might also remember that past president Frank Stevenson established the Texas Opportunity and Justice Incubator, also known as ji. With us today, we have JI’S director Joshua Weaver. Joshua is a technologist and he brings that background to, to help attorneys in Texas leverage tools like AI in their practices. So we actually have the very people we need for this. So Megan and Joshua, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Joshua Weaver:

Thank you for having me back, Rocky. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Megan Goor-Peters:

Thank you.

Rocky Dhir:

Now, Joshua, let’s, for those who are unaware, let’s start with a quick overview of what Togi does because it’s super cool, but you probably will explain it better than I do.

Joshua Weaver:

Yeah, is, I mean, I tell people this all the time. This is really my dream. I could not have imagined something so great would exist when I went off to law school. But essentially my role is to help attorneys through the process of starting and growing successful law firms that are usually either Solo or small firms and with a particular focus on serving middle class and low income Americans. I think at this point, a lot of people are familiar with that ABA research that suggested that 80% of Americans perceive or cannot afford an attorney to access the legal system. So JI’S mission is to try and make an impact there and change that through helping attorneys start successful law firms.

Rocky Dhir:

And Megan, you serve on the task force that’s been examining ai. So I guess tell us how long that task force has been around and how has your perspective on AI changed since you’ve been on it?

Megan Goor-Peters:

Well, it’s fairly new. It’s the current state bar’s, president’s vision. So it’s fairly new. Actually, Joshua and I both serve on it together, so we don’t have a lot to report right yet. We’re still testing the waters and seeing what the landscape’s going to be and hopefully come up with some good plans for different practices, different areas of practice, and especially for paralegals who are very concerned about their job to be on the lookout for,

Rocky Dhir:

Well, I remember lawyers used to always say, and I think they still do that more valuable than finding a good lawyer for your team. Paralegals are worth twice their weight in gold. And so is that perspective kind of changing with AI or because you said paralegals are worried about getting replaced, but there’s a lot that paralegals do. I don’t see how AI would replace them, but maybe you have a different perspective.

Megan Goor-Peters:

Some of ’em are a little concerned, and I think that’s because of maybe the fear of ai, not knowing enough about it. I think if they don’t try to learn about it or embrace it, that they are going to be left behind. So the paralegals who do want to use AI because it’s here, they need to learn that to train with it because it will help them with their tasks. I mean, we are, and I appreciate what you said, paralegals are very essential to the offices of attorneys who do use paralegals. There are some attorneys who don’t use paralegals, so they don’t know what they’re missing out yet, but if they had a Paralegal, they would never know how they had practice law without one. So I appreciate that. So I do think that the paralegals just need to understand that they need to adapt because there’ll be a Paralegal out there who will adapt, and that’s the fear.

Rocky Dhir:

So Joshua, maybe you’ve had some experience with this at togi, but what impact has AI had so far on the lawyers that you’ve been mentoring at togi?

Joshua Weaver:

I’ve found this to be very polarizing so far. We’re a little over a year into the release of chat GPT on the world, and I would start by making the point that AI is not new. This technology has been around for a long time and a lot of folks have been using it, but it’s really had a renaissance in the last year. And so I feel like there’s two groups shaping up and in the TOGI program, I see attorneys that are constantly pressed for time. They are trying to wear all the hats at once. They have to be their own marketer, they have to be their own IT support. They have to figure out how to manage their time, do all the administrative tasks, their billing. I mean, there’s a lot that goes into running a successful firm beyond just the good practice of law. And so among that group of people, the boots on the ground, so to speak, I think they’re really leaning into and embracing this technology. We meet once a week and regularly people will share their successes and the experiments that they’ve run throughout the week using AI to enable them to move faster, work smarter, accomplish a lot of those tasks in ways that they were never previously capable of doing.

Rocky Dhir:

Is that in core legal functions or is that with ancillary functions like you said it or running your website or what have you? Or are they actually using it in their practice itself?

Joshua Weaver:

I see a little bit of both. And so the framework that I’ve been going to is for lawyers, there’s reading, there’s learning, there’s operating and there’s drafting. And between those four categories, I’m seeing attorneys do experiments and enhance their workflow in each of those four core ways. There’s a lot of information to keep up with as an attorney. And so having a tool that can quickly summarize and educate you on that information is very helpful from a learning perspective, whenever you are trying to master new facts about a case or trying to develop your expertise in some new area, the generative AI has been very helpful there. From an operation standpoint, we know that one of the chief complaints for attorneys is a lack of communication. And so these tools are empowering attorneys to communicate more efficiently, more accurately than they’ve ever communicated before. And clients really like that. They’re responding very positively to that. And then of course, we’ve all heard the horror stories about drafting where somebody drafts something and they make a mistake and they don’t check it, and then that becomes very embarrassing. But there’s a lot of great work being done in that area where people are applying their professional judgment and expertise and using those AI tools in order to get better work done and get it done faster.

Rocky Dhir:

Now, Megan in your, you’re effectively serving one firm and then you’re working with paralegals presumably from other firms. Have you found the same kind of polarizing the two camps, the ones that are embracing AI and ones that aren’t? Or is the Paralegal world approaching this differently? No,

Megan Goor-Peters:

Actually we are seeing it two different camps. So there are some with the newer, younger paralegals who are embracing it, so they use it with summarizing depositions or eDiscovery is a big helpful use with ai. Of course, the career paralegals like myself don’t really see the need right now, but I think if they just had a little bit of a taste of it, they could understand how much this would help streamline our routine task and make us more elevated in what we do and let us be freed up to do the more other types of work that we really need to focus on instead of the routine type things.

Rocky Dhir:

There’s really a question maybe for both of you then is do you think AI is going to be like a pendulum right now we’re all going fast hurtling towards trying to incorporate AI into different aspects of our practices and the way our firms work, and then at some point the pendulum swings back and everybody says, no more humans, fewer, fewer computers. Do you think we’re on a pendulum or do you think this is kind of a one-way street in which ai, it’s just going to keep adding and adding and adding and building? So Megan, we can start with you on that.

Megan Goor-Peters:

To me, I think it’s a one-way street. I think that with all the hesitation with law firms using it well, and there’s just so many things, this is a fire starter, so everybody wants to jump in, but we need to be a little bit more careful, take a little bit a step back, have some guardrails up to before we start using it and implementing it because we have so many other areas that need to be regulated or talked about in ethics and things like that. So I don’t see the pendulum yet. I just think it’s just going to be a slow road to go to that other end of using AI for paralegals. Anyway.

Rocky Dhir:

Joshua, how about you?

Joshua Weaver:

I am surprised by the large number of people that appear to be almost sleepwalking through what I think is the most significant invention and achievement of all humankind in all history. I mean, in many ways the AI that we’re seeing develop right now is kind of the culmination of all of the sciences throughout all of history and all of the academic study throughout all of history has sort of inevitably led us to this moment. And we blew by the Turing test and it was like nothing happened. And I think there’s still this camp of folks that think of they have chat GPT in their mind and they think, oh, it’s cute that that robot can spit out some poems and do some creative writing. And I think what they’re maybe underestimating is the speed at which this is growing. I mean, we seem to be on an exponential growth trajectory. And I think the other thing that perhaps they’re underestimating is the multiplicative effect of combining AI with other technologies. And so we have advancements in robotics, we have advancements in biology, medicine, material sciences processes. And when you start to combine these technologies, you start to get even more rapid growth and it starts to accelerate faster and faster and faster. So no, I definitely do not think that this is a pendulum effect. I think this is going to only go faster and become more intense over the next few years.

Rocky Dhir:

We need to talk a little bit more about that and what that means for lawyers and how we evolve. But before we do that, we’re going to hear from one of our sponsors, and when we come back, we’re going to talk with Joshua and Megan a little bit more about what this means. So guys, stay tuned. We’ll be back with our guests in just a couple of moments. Alright, folks, we are back with Megan Goor-Peters and Joshua Weaver talking about AI and the practice of law. There’s been this concept that AI say in things like drafting, whether it’s a contract or a brief or a memo or even creative writing outside of the law, that AI is going to start. You can start making standardized briefs very easily using ai. What about the role of lawyers in adding creativity and the human touch? Do you think AI is going to cover that as well at some point? Or is there, I guess the other way of saying it is, what is the role of the human being in a world in which AI is going to start taking greater and greater precedence?

Joshua Weaver:

Yeah, this is such a good question and I spend a lot of time trying to figure this out myself. I’m not sure that I have a definitive answer or prediction yet, but I think many people sense that we are right on the edge or right on the verge of achieving a GI, artificial general intelligence. And then many people predict that soon to follow after a GI will be some form of super intelligence. And this is sort of the moment where the technology becomes equal to and then superior to humans at performing human tasks. And there’s this great irony that I feel like more people should appreciate and get, which is that we reimagine that these tools would automate the most boring tasks first, and that the sort of creative spirit was something uniquely human. And as it turns out, that’s just not correct. We now know, as you were referencing in the intro, comedians can use AI to come up with a structure for a joke, right?

Think about the nuance and the context and the creativity that goes into writing a good joke. I mean, that’s something that I think we’ve classically thought of as a uniquely human ability, and we’re seeing the trend away from that in a direction where technology will be able to do a lot of that as well. And so I think if I were to make one point here, it’s that a lot of people feel fear and anxiety from a scarcity. They worry about their jobs, they worry about how their role will change as this new technology is embraced throughout the world. But I think that with every major technology boom, there comes a new abundance. And I really believe that for attorneys, this is highly relevant. We have a lot of people that are unhappy and stressed out. They are doing a lot of activities that they frankly just don’t enjoy doing.

Now, it can be very profitable through the billable hour model, but it’s not necessarily something that anyone really enjoys doing. And it’s taking people away from time with their kids, time with their family, spending time on themselves with self-care and hobbies. And so I really see this technology as, yes, it’s going to reshape how professionals work and it’s going to replace and shift the models of profitability for attorneys. But I think that this will be an abundance. I don’t think this is going to be a negative. I think it’s going to be a net positive and we’ll just have to rethink what is our role. Some people have conjecture that the attorney will take over the last mile of delivering legal

Rocky Dhir:

Services. I’ve heard that phrase. Yes.

Joshua Weaver:

And so essentially the AI will do the grunt work and then the attorney will come in and sort of check the work, make sure it’s right, and then apply some professional judgment and creative decision-making. And I think that’s a helpful way of thinking about it as we move into the unknown. But this is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I mean, we’ve never had a technology this powerful. And so predicting how that’s going to affect the future is I think difficult.

Rocky Dhir:

Megan, how about you? You’re looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Where do you think the role of human beings will be in this new world in which AI is at least playing a role, if not a dominant role?

Megan Goor-Peters:

Well, I agree with Joshua on what he’s saying, and for lawyers specifically, it is going to be hard because you do see some of the AI that comes out, the chat bots and things like that do have some type of personality. So you wonder about that too. But all in all, I guess how I can say it is as a personal injury, Paralegal, when I interview a client, I see it in their eyes. I feel it in their voice. I know they have automated intake questionnaires, AI right now, but I don’t think they pick up on these things. And I think this is something that the Paralegal can certainly convey to the attorney, which will eventually get to a jury. And I don’t think AI will have a play in that. But all in all, to me, being a lawyer is an art form. So the empathy and the creativity that comes into play with being a lawyer, I don’t think AI can pick up on quite that yet.

Rocky Dhir:

Here’s something that I’ve talked to lawyers about when we talk about ai, which is, and this is kind of a hypothesis and I want to see what each of you thinks of this. It’s that you can never fully replace a human until you’ve replaced the judges with AI as well, because as long as you’ve got a judge and long as you’ve got juries that are all humans, there’s something about that human interaction that no AI can ever fully replace. So that’s where the role of human beings comes in, at least when it comes to say Litigation something where there’s a very people facing component to it. Am I thinking of that incorrectly or would you agree with that particular take?

Megan Goor-Peters:

I definitely agree. I think to kind of expand on what we were talking about too, and this question is like I did hear one lawyer say that he would throw in ask for deposition questions when he threw in a complaint and certainly would get all the questions back, but he didn’t feel that the AI had the capability of strategizing that, putting the questions in the right order, making it sound like the person or putting it into the mindset of how he wanted the person to answer those questions. So I think that applies in the Courtroom as well.

Rocky Dhir:

Joshua, how about you?

Joshua Weaver:

I’m not as certain, honestly, and this may sound a little out there, but I think we are right on the verge of AI being able to be really good at these skills. And I’ll give you a practical example from Litigation. One of the experiments that I’ve been running is in a past life, I used to help run focus groups for plaintiff civil Litigation. And so we would focus group a case, a big case coming up, and we would hire real people that matched the demographics of the jury that we were going to try the case in front of. And we would give it a college try in front of those real people and kind of feel out what they thought and get their opinions on it. And so one of the experiments I’ve been running over the past six months is I’ve been using AI and I’ve been creating AI personas based on the demographics of the people that would be in the juries where the cases are going to be tried.

And then I can run that simulation of the focus group asking the same questions, presenting the same materials that I would in real life, but do it all virtually. And I can run that simulation hundreds or thousands of times. And so I’m doing the same type of exercise, but I’m doing it much more cost effectively, and I’m getting a much larger sample size, and the results are very early. I don’t want to over promise on this technology, but at least at this point, we’re seeing that those AI focus groups are matching the real life focus group results even down to the person with about an 80 to 90% accuracy. And so when you think about how close that is, is it perfect? No, there’s still, there is something uniquely human about having the actual physical person there to watch the presentation, but if you can get within 80 to 90% and you can do it a thousand times, I mean, that’s a very powerful tool. And I’m not sure, I’m not where I come down on where attorneys will be in the Litigation process in the future. It’s nice to think that we will always be so integral to delivering legal services, but given how fast this technology is developing and how capable it seems to be, I’m just, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Rocky Dhir:

Okay, this is maybe a great moment for us to take another break, hear from one of our sponsors, and then come back and talk a little bit maybe about structurally what the state bar and what state bars across the country need to be doing when it comes to managing ai. Sit tight. We’ll be back in just a few. We are back. We were just talking with Joshua and Megan about the role if any of humans in a future AI-driven economy in an AI-driven world. So one question during the break that kind of occurred to me is do you foresee a day when we don’t need lawyers at all anymore because everything is so cut and dried? I’m trying to put my sci-fi hat on, but I’m trying to imagine a future where conflicts are resolved almost immediately because there’s an AI function that tells you exactly who wins and who loses and what the correct outcome is. Is that a future that you see possibly coming to fruition as well?

Joshua Weaver:

I do think that that is going to be an almost inevitable outcome for some situations. I mean, we have very large unmet legal needs in the United States and around the world, frankly. And I do think that a lot of people, given the option to use a less expensive and much quicker process to resolve their disputes, will probably find that very appealing at some point. And so I think that’s a real possibility. And then

Rocky Dhir:

Appealing back to whether,

Joshua Weaver:

No pun intended. And then on the other hand, I think a better way of thinking about will essentially are robots going to replace lawyers? It’s more that I think there will be a real merge between humans and ai. And this is already sort of happening. We offload so much of our memory and our thought process to smartphones and applications that keep track of our lives. And really, I see AI as sort of collapsing many of those tools much in the same way that smartphones collapsed a lot of hardware devices into one single thing. And so I think that the ai, we will come to think of it as an extension of ourselves that is so integrated with our own minds and our own personalities that it really just all becomes sort of one and the same.

Rocky Dhir:

Interesting. Megan, how about you? What’s your thoughts on this? Well,

Megan Goor-Peters:

I like what Josh was saying about those things. There is certainly a great deal already going on with the access to justice in different states, the Innocent project, and California’s being very successful using AI to help people who are in prison. So it is there, and I do see some people, some attorneys will turn to if they have a quick question about something to look for, automatic answers, especially like in employment law about different guidelines that they need to follow when something happens in their business completely replacing, I just don’t want to say yes or no. I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about that. I would think that the human element, like I said, the judgment, the empathy, the adaptability that we have just cannot be replaced. And like I said with the lady I’m interviewing, you can say she’s got a 10 on the pain scale, but if you see it in her eyes, it’s just more than a 10. This life-changing event happened to her. And I just don’t think the human element and plus the fact check validating that has to go on with everything that AI does. I don’t see how that’s going to happen anytime soon. For sure. Everything that we do is going to have to be validated. I mean, no doubt.

Rocky Dhir:

Let’s talk for a moment about the nuts and bolts of incorporating AI into a legal practice. So I think we spent some time kind of talking in the future, talking in broader strokes. Now let’s talk about brass tacks to some extent. So let’s say a lawyer decides, okay, I’m going to start using chat GPT, I’m going to get an open AI account, and it doesn’t have to be chat GPT specifically, but that or any other similar program, and I’m going to start using it in some way to help me draft brief draft contracts, what have you. Isn’t there a big privacy concern when you’re dumping all this? Because to do that, you’ve got to dump client data, you’ve got to put depositions, possibly medical records, and you’ve got to feed it into an AI into some kind of AI interface. It’s now going to spit back to you the results that it’s come up with. Has there been any progress or any talk about what we as lawyers need to do when it comes to data privacy and client confidentiality in that context? I

Megan Goor-Peters:

Don’t know any of any firm that uses AI that extensively yet. So I can’t really say. I think we’re taking baby steps right now with all the different things that are happening in the legal system in the Courtroom. So the law firms are standing back to see how those things are panning out. Like I was talking about earlier, and I think other people mentioned to it, having guardrails. When you do have AI in your business, you want to make sure that you have a policy in place. You want to make sure that you have the disclosure to clients if you’re going to be using this and how to train your employees, how many people are going to be using the chat, how often and what are they using it for? And I mean, the other basic element to all this is the terms of agreements that you sign with it. It’s no different than all the 10 page things that we sign on. Anything that we do, Netflix or whatever, the number seven item on their terms of service on OpenAI is that you have to, so they won’t be held responsible for anything that they do. So it’s still a little bit something that we need to mold as far as I know.

Rocky Dhir:

Joshua, how about you? Privacy data privacy, client confidentiality.

Joshua Weaver:

Privacy is definitely a huge concern. Data security is a huge concern, but I would like to dispel the myth that there aren’t currently safe ways to do this. And I’ll give you two relatively accessible examples. So one example is Microsoft is the major investor behind OpenAI and they have an enterprise service called Azure. And Azure integrates with OpenAI, and you can actually, a Solo attorney with a relatively limited budget can create an Azure account. And in enterprise secure space, they can upload data including confidential and sensitive information. They can follow all of the correct cybersecurity and data privacy procedures and policies, and they can run the open AI model on top of that data. And it’s in a completely private and secure manner, and that’s available today. Anyone can go and create account and try that. I would advise that if you are doing this with sensitive information, you should definitely look into doing it through something like that rather than just feeding it into chat.

GPT. Another thing that I think people should really be keeping an eye on is there’s a huge push in the technology community to publish what are called open source models. And that’s models where the code is available for anyone. It can be downloaded and modified by anyone. And so there are models that are being produced as we speak and that have already been published that you can actually run completely locally on your own device. And so you can download these models, you can set them up on your home computer, and the data is not being transferred off of your device as these models are being deployed. And so that’s another way to achieve data privacy and security is by just not uploading the data that’s sensitive into the cloud. Although I would mention I think the cloud security around Azure and these other platforms that are enterprise grade is actually quite good and something that people can trust.

Rocky Dhir:

As lawyers, you both know this, lawyers in the legal profession we’re inherently risk averse. We don’t like to take chances. I’m old enough to remember when lawyers still wanted a fax and we didn’t want to email things. And I mean, it’s just every time there’s a new technology, we always get nervous and we don’t want to embrace it. But as I get older, I realize there’s a good reason for this because as lawyers, yeah, we’re risk averse and the business community makes fun of us, but it’s also because taking a risk entails potential liability. And that liability to us as lawyers can mean that we lose our bar cards, we lose our livelihoods. And so now effectively the business community is asking us, the clients I should say, are asking us to embrace AI to lower costs, but then that creates an inherent risk to the attorney. The attorneys aren’t going to get in trouble for doing things the old way and doing it the way it’s always been done. But if you try something new and it doesn’t work right, or you don’t do it right now, suddenly you could get sanctioned or have some kind of thing happen to your bar card. So how do you think that the law should embrace these new concepts in light of this inherent risk to our livelihoods?

Joshua Weaver:

One of the things that I tell attorneys when I’m coaching them about the use of AI is I fall back on what I call the ten eighty ten rule, which is if you are using AI for a significant part of let’s say the drafting process of emotion, you want to start by putting in the initial 10%, right? You want to be thoughtful about what are you trying to achieve, what are the important key points? What’s the strategy, right? This is the stuff that Megan has really done a great job of identifying as sort of the human elements that are important. Then the 80% in the middle, you want to supervise the technology as the technology gets that done quickly and efficiently. But very important on the end, there’s another 10% where you need to go back in and you need to make sure that you’re using your professional judgment and your expertise to make sure that everything aligns with the work product that you are producing. And I think through that process, because attorneys are risk averse and because identifying and managing risk is one of our core skills, I think we’re actually uniquely well-suited to navigate the unknown of how do we incorporate these new tools that do carry risk into the workplace.

Rocky Dhir:

Let’s maybe talk about things like ethics and professional liability. There’s a rule in Texas, and I think most states that lawyers cannot get the client to just waive liability against the attorney. So we cannot have a retainer agreement that says, Hey, we’re going to do the following things, and in exchange, you are absolving us, you’re indemnifying us of any and all liability. We don’t get that option even though the business community does. So two businesses can indemnify one another. You can, as was pointed out earlier, Megan, I think you made this point with chat. GPT term condition number seven says you indemnify chat, GPT as a normal consumer, lawyers don’t have that benefit. So if we’re going to take on something new like this and we’re going to try it for the benefit of our clients to make things faster, more efficient and less expensive, do you think now Texas law has to change? Does a state bar need to now advocate and say, we need to have new ethics rules around allowing some license to use ai, and more importantly, do we need to now change that common law rule that says that clients can’t indemnify us from all liability for trying something new like this?

Megan Goor-Peters:

I do believe the state bars looking at that as well as all the other bars across the nation with Texas, though we have the disciplinary rule 1.01 that talks about competence and diligent representation. And I think the state bar is going to take a closer look at that on how we can expand. They had just recently had added technology that attorneys need to have relevant technology expertise in their practice. So I think they’re going to expand that, of course, to include ai, but I don’t know how quickly that’s going to be. So attorneys right now really need to look at their cybersecurity insurance and have a policy in place before they even try to start using that throughout their practice like you’re talking about.

Rocky Dhir:

It’s interesting if you say that now attorneys have to be at least minimally conversant with ai. Now you’re just adding on something more that attorneys have to do, but then that liability risk is still there. And I think that might be what’s causing us to hold back. So now, Joshua, let’s kick this over to you. How would you kind of throw all this together or make it all make sense?

Joshua Weaver:

Well, I have to give so much credit to President Cindy Tisdale and all of the folks that are in the AI task force right now. I think there’s some really smart folks that are working very hard on trying to find answers to these difficult questions, and I wouldn’t want to get out ahead of their work. I’m very eager to see where that task force goes and what they ultimately recommend. But I would also say this has always been an underlying tension for attorneys. The number one way that attorneys accidentally break confidentiality is through sending an email to the wrong person. And so the idea of attorneys needing to deal with the challenges of facing that liability and the new technology at the same time, I think that’s actually nothing new. It takes on a different appearance when AI is involved, but this is kind of a thing that has already happened, and attorneys just need to keep that rule of technology competency in mind, and they need to take reasonable steps to educate themselves about what the technology does, what are its potential downsides, and then also what are the upsides.

I mean, one of the hot topics in higher education over the last couple of weeks has been AI has revealed that there have been these incidences of plagiarism among very high profile academics. And somebody other than me came to this conclusion, but I totally agree, which is that in the future, it will be academic malpractice not to use AI to check your own work for plagiarism. And I think that lawyers will be in a similar situation where, yes, there are risks to using this technology, but in the very near future, I think it’ll essentially be similar to legal not to use AI to make sure that you are zealously representing your client to the best of your ability. And whether that’s checking your motions or steel manning your arguments, what might opposing Counsel say, if I make this argument or I make this objection, I think that that is actually going to become a necessary part of the workflow for attorneys.

Megan Goor-Peters:

I agree. For new lawyers coming out, doing zillions of drafts for the other attorneys is going to stop. They’re going to start with a draft from AI before they move on. It’s going to be just normalcy to them, to them.

Rocky Dhir:

So that becomes effectively your first year associate at a large firm. The AI is doing it now. Others have to now effectively edit that. How do we then avoid, I guess if we’re all relying on AI and the AI is starting to churn out workforce us, there’s at least some risk I would think, of the AI making things very uniform. Whereas attorneys like to have their own writing style. We like to entertain the judge to the extent that we can with the brief, we want to make our points in a way that might resonate with a particular appellate panel if it goes to that extent. There’s that kind of 3D level thinking that’s going on when you’re drafting something. How do you manage that? If everything we do has to go through the AI first, is the idea then that effectively you let the AI come up with the skeleton and now you put in all those elements, but then does that take away from the creative component of just writing from a blank slate upfront?

Megan Goor-Peters:

Well, I think that’s just the way it’s going to be as far as the newer lawyers, that’s just going to be how they approach things is they’re just going to turn to AI and go there. A quick example is when Westlaw came out and we had online searching and the new lawyers were using Google, I was just appalled that they would use Google to look up something instead of going through Westlaw online. And that’s just how they’re doing things. So I don’t think that’s going to change much as far as that goes. But to answer your question, yes, I think like Josh was talking about the last 10% and the first 10% may have to be moved to the bottom, so it’ll be the last 20%. The attorney will change it to modify it, their style to their creativity, and to get the point across the strategizing that they want to implement into their document.

Rocky Dhir:

Fair enough. Joshua, sounds like you’re probably going to agree with most of that. Yeah,

Joshua Weaver:

I have two points here. Point number one is I think that in the future, we are going to look back on the last few years with great nostalgia for the last few years, representing really the last time in history where a majority of content was created by humans rather than created by ai. I think it’s going to be a relatively short period of time before the amount of content, text, images, video, so on and so forth, created by AI is going to absolutely dwarf the amount of information that humans are creating. And so I think we’re going to look back on this time with a lot of nostalgia. And then point number two is I think the future of how we’re going to use AI really does look sort of like us becoming in, you could almost say like a cyborg, where we have our AI that is integrated into our work and personal life. And I think that that AI will actually come to learn our personality. It will train on our writing style, it will train on our sense of humor, and it will become an extension of the way that we think and write that is uniquely us. And so in a very interesting way, I think that the AI will actually allow us to continue to do creative, fun, interesting writing and continue our motion practice in a way that does represent us, but it’s because the AI will be very personalized and local to our own personalities.

Rocky Dhir:

This has been absolutely fascinating, but we are towards, we have reached the end of our time, unfortunately. So Megan and Joshua, thank you both for joining us today and for giving us a glimpse into what may lie ahead. So thank you both for being here. Thank

Joshua Weaver:

You. Thank you so much for inviting me back.

Rocky Dhir:

Absolutely. And as you know, I am your host, Locutus of Borg, for all you Star Trek fans. Okay. We’re ending with the Cyborg reference. Okay. And of course, I want to thank you for tuning in and encourage you to stay safe and be well. If you like what you heard today, please rate and review us, an Apple podcast, Google podcast, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, remember, life’s a journey, folks. I’m Rocky Dhir signing off.

Rocky Dhir:

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