You are handing a case involving millions of pages of documentation, emails, etc., including documentation with sensitive trade secrets and intellectual property. You are under the gun to submit a brief in opposition to a motion seeking injunctive relief. You want to use state of the art tools for jury selection. You want to do predictive modeling for an analysis of whether your client should settle a case and for how much. You might think the answer to these tasks is artificial intelligence (AI). Not so fast … and, more importantly, not without reviewing, verifying and using the skills, instincts and experience of human professionals. No, lawyers are not becoming obsolete and AI, in its current iteration, is showing how valuable human intelligence and experience is.
The pitfalls of blindly using AI, in lieu of your good old legal skills and analysis, have been most glaring and prominent in legal research and writing. Most attorneys now know how to open the internet or an AI app and ask for answers to a legal question, and many of attorneys may have already tried using the results of those searches to draft a brief or other argument. Some attorneys, albeit a fewer number, however, have done so blindly, trusting, but not verifying, that what AI generated was accurate, going so far as to cite and quote those cases. Those attorneys did so at their own peril and to the detriment of their reputations, wallets and clients’ cases.