Use of AI Generally in Legal Practice

Law firms, courts, and law clinics are rushing to experiment with and implement a wide range of AI-based tools to assist with many facets of legal practice and practice management. Current uses include:

  • Conducting or assisting legal research
  • Summarizing documents, transcripts, or discovery materials
  • Generating transcripts of meetings and interviews
  • Internal research and knowledge management
  • Preparing drafts of clauses, contracts, deposition questions, witness statements, and other documents
  • E-discovery
  • Interactive client portals
  • AI legal assistants for lawyers
  • Law-firm management and operations, including “instrumental writing” (client alerts, newsletters, press releases, and other marketing material), billing and other administrative tasks, etc.

General Resources

  • Andrew Perlman: “The Implications of ChatGPT for Legal Services and Society,” Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 22-14, (updated February 29, 2024) 
  • Berkeley Law: “Generative AI Resources” Collection of materials dealing with the use of AI for law school teaching and scholarship, legal practice, and access to justice.
  • Jonathan Choi, Amy Monahan, and Daniel Schwarcz: “Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (November 7, 2023) (from the abstract: “We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. . . . We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. . . . These results have important descriptive and normative implications for the future of lawyering. Descriptively, they suggest that AI assistance can significantly improve productivity and satisfaction, and that it can be selectively employed by lawyers in areas where AI is most useful. Because AI tools have an equalizing effect on performance, they may also promote equality in a famously unequal profession. Normatively, our findings suggest that law schools, lawyers, judges, and clients should affirmatively embrace AI tools and plan for a future in which they will become widespread.“
  • Danielle Braff, ABA Journal: “Take heed before using artificial intelligence, new ABA ethics opinion says” July 29, 2024 (reporting on the release of the first formal ABA ethics opinion on lawyer use of AI)
    • ABA: “Formal Opinion 512 — Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools“, released July 29, 2024 (from the conclusion: “Lawyers using GAI [generative AI] tools have a duty of competence, including maintaining relevant technological competence, which requires an understanding of the evolving nature of GAI. Inusing GAI tools, lawyers also have other relevant ethical duties, such as those relating to confidentiality, communication with a client, meritorious claims and contentions, candor toward the tribunal, supervisory responsibilities regarding others in the law office using the technology and those outside the law office providing GAI services, and charging reasonable fees. With the ever-evolving use of technology by lawyers and courts, lawyers must be vigilant in complying with the Rules of Professional Conduct to ensure that lawyers are adhering to their ethical responsibilities and that clients are protected.”) 
  • Justin Henry, The American Lawyer: “We Asked Every Am Law 100 Law Firm How They’re Using Gen AI. Here’s What We Learned” January 29, 2024
  • Dan Roe, The American Lawyer: “Clients, Common Sense Drive Big Law Gen AI Policies,” January 31, 2024
  • The Recorder — Isha Marathe: “‘ChatGPT Wrapper’ Is This Year’s Hottest Snub—But Why?” August 08, 2024
  • Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession: “Ethical Prompts: Professionalism, ethics, and ChatGPT” The Practice — March/April 2023
  • ABA Cynthia H Cwik, Christopher A Suarez, and Lucy L Thomson, ed’s: Artificial Intelligence: Legal Issues, Policy, and Practical Strategies” (2024) (“covers a wide range of important topics concerning AI and the law, and provides practical advice to attorneys on how to navigate these complex and rapidly evolving issues.“)

Use by Courts

High-Level, Theoretical, And/Or Technical Views of AI and Legal Practice