It can be hard to escape the steady drumbeat of news articles, think pieces, or orders from your company’s HR department about how various forms of artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way work is done. If everyone has the tools to be their own lawyer, accountant, corporate strategist, designer, and software engineer, then so much of the drudgery of our jobs will evaporate, and the best ideas and most creative, driven people will succeed.
That sounds good for you, our client, but bad for us, as lawyers! Not like we are known for our creativity—the artists with no talent are the ones that become lawyers. And indeed, we have begun to see clients use AI to assist in legal activities, whether by drafting contracts and term sheets, running analysis through ChatGPT, or similar. And, used appropriately, we encourage it! There are not enough lawyers to provide all of the legal services the world needs, and the more it can be outsourced, the better. With that said, when it matters, there are some services your lawyers at Milgrom, Daskam, & Ellis can perform that no large-language model (“LLM”) will ever offer.
- LLMS DO NOT CARRY MALPRACTICE INSURANCE: We, by contrast, do. If you act on your AI’s inaccurate or hallucinated legal advice, you will be considered responsible for your incorrect actions. If your lawyer badly screws up, you have the option to file a malpractice claim, and the comfort of knowing that your lawyer is insured. On high risk or high value matters, that extra risk assurance is the best protection you can have.
- LAWYERS ACTUALLY ARE CREATIVE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH: Oversimplifying a bit, most LLMs work by choosing the most likely word or concept to come next in a sentence responsive to your prompt, based on the huge amount of statistical data at their disposal. What that means is that LLMs, even when working properly, will provide a ‘median’ answer to a prompt. By contrast, lawyers specialize in outlier situations—odd business disputes; angry employees; complicated transactions, and the like. If you want a new concept as part of your business sale, or to make a novel argument in court as to how to interpret a law, you are going to need a thinking engine that doesn’t automatically trend towards standard solutions. You want a real attorney.
- WE CAN WRITE PROMPTS TOO!: Attorneys are themselves adopting AI into their practices at increasing rates. Given that the quality of an AI’s output is based on the detail of the underlying prompt, attorneys can (and do) tend to use AI more efficiently to produce legal documents than do non-attorneys.
- THE PRIVILEGED FEW: What you enter into an AI prompt is subject to the terms and conditions of that AI producer. Generally, those terms allow the AI to use anything that you input for its own internal training, meaning that your prompts can end up featuring in answers to unrelated questions. Moreover, while your strategy sessions with your lawyer are (unless its plotting a crime) privileged, your strategy sessions with AI are not. That means that any personally identifiable information (e.g., names of businesses referred to in prompts), smoking guns (don’t ask an LLM the best bleach to remove blood stains), or negotiating strategy can become public without your consent and control.
- FINESSE, NOT JUST FORCE: The best analytical skill that your lawyer brings to bear is restraint. If you ask an AI to analyze your contract your gardener wants you to sign for landscaping services, you are going to receive a detailed response about, amongst other things, the lack of privacy and data collection protections. We know what is most important, are trained to figure out what you actually need (as opposed to what you might think you need) to solve the problems you present to us, and we focus on what matters. As a client, your most valuable resource is your attention, and we don’t waste it simply to provide a detailed response for detail’s sake.
And remember, your friendly attorneys at Milgrom, Daskam, & Ellis are always around when you need the human touch.
