Every lawyer in the country has read enough of the stories—where an attorney is caught relying on AI to prepare a brief, and the brief is riddled with errors.
It’s to the point now that every lawyer should know the risks to their client (and their careers) they face if they exclusively rely on AI to do their work. It’s literal malpractice.
But when it comes to promoting their own practice, too many attorneys trust the same techniques and the same AI services that wouldn’t fly in court.
Why are you willing to stake your reputation on AI slop, when you’d never do that for your clients? Why does your entire practice deserve less quality work than your smallest matter? And what are you missing out on when you depend on it?
The human ingenuity that makes you a successful lawyer.
LLMs Can’t Think Like an LLM
At some point, every law student is told that they must learn to “think like a lawyer.” What that means is left up for each student to figure out, but attorneys eventually sense that it’s about understanding the opposition’s arguments better than they do. It’s about having all the answers before even the opposition realizes what questions to ask. It’s about seeing future liabilities and vulnerabilities. It’s about seeing gaps in the law and where the law is headed.
So, by definition, the best large language models (LLMs) can’t be as good as an attorney with an LLM (or JD). Because LLMs aren’t future-oriented. They just regurgitate past information. They have such enormous datasets that they’re really good at that, but at a certain point, there’s a cap on what they can do.
Distinguishing – Not Hallucinating
Those nightmarish court cases we’ve read about show where AI services break down in the practice of law. Because LLMs apparently follow the practice that, when there’s case law that goes against a client, the correct response is to make up fake cases that support them.
By contrast, human lawyers learn—on the first day of legal research and writing—that even marginal lawyers know not to falsify or pretend away a contra case. And good lawyers can distinguish their case from negative precedent, and great lawyers find new connections with other cases that support their argument.
Take Representing Your Own Practice as Seriously as Your Representation of Your Clients
If you want to win in court, you know that you need human attorneys working on the case.
In the same way, if you want to win in the court of public opinion—garner the respect of your peers and colleagues—content from real, live human attorneys is the answer.
Just as you make the case for your client, you want humans making the case for you.