How Not to Use Artificial Intelligence to Inform and Help Your Lawyer
Many individuals or businesses facing a legal issue these days start their research using artificial intelligence, generally a large language model such as Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT. The daunting gap of knowledge confronting most clients faced with a dispute or litigation can be overwhelming. These tools can help to give peace of mind and some framework for thinking about your dispute. However, there are serious risks to blindly using LLMs and artificial intelligence to research your dispute and prepare summaries and information for your lawyer. There are also helpful ways to use these tools. This article will explore both.
What to Watch Out For
There are seven main risks for parties involved in disputes using artificial intelligence prior to engaging a lawyer. These are:
You have no solicitor-client privilege when using these tools without a lawyer. You are also at serious risk of waiving litigation privilege if you use publicly available artificial intelligence tools because the public version of those tools do not contain sufficient privacy protections in their terms and conditions. All major artificial intelligence LLM tools also send data to the United States for processing and many non-enterprise versions of these models store data at rest in the United States. You are thus potentially forfeiting privilege over documents now held in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
AI generated summaries are usually missing key pieces of information and key documents. Without this information your counsel will not be properly informed. Additionally, given the length of AI briefs this can be very misleading to your legal counsel and can lead to mistakes and additional legal work that drives up your costs.
Artificial Intelligence summaries often make material inference errors. By relying on these models to provide complete case summaries, you are often propagating inference errors, which can lead to mistakes, confusion, and increased costs as counsel must sort through the AI summaries and verify them against the actual evidence and law relevant to your case.
Relying too much on AI can result in you failing to put in sufficient mental effort to focus the issues, gather all relevant evidence, and work with your counsel to achieve these fundamental outcomes required for any effective litigation strategy.
AI summaries and briefs are often misleading on what the best legal strategy is, what available remedies are and which ones make sense, and even can mislead you on how to instruct your counsel. AI can suggest an approach that is fundamentally wrong or misconceived, or give you a false sense of hope, or lead you down the wrong path of questions and considerations.
Many, if not most, AI generated briefs and summaries are over-long and weirdly written with poor syntax and awkward phrasing that is difficult to parse. It is also far too easy for AI to produce massive summaries with massive files, poorly conceived indices, and do so while missing essential pieces of information and evidence. Asking counsel to parse through these types of documents will end up costing you more than it is worth as counsel always has to verify any summary against actual evidence and will have to talk to you to do so. Usually a direct conversation with your counsel where you summarize the issues, allow for dialogue and questions, and follow up with specific requests from counsel will be far more efficient, effective, and reliable than trying to rely on AI summary documents.
AI can easily give you a false sense of knowledge about the law, legal strategy, legal procedure, and even the business realities of how to manage a dispute effectively. You should engage with and listen to your counsel, who are experts in these matters, rather than let AI tell you what to think or what the law is.
AI tools can be very useful in many circumstances, when properly vetted, fit for task and purpose, and protected by enterprise and fiduciary level guardrails and privacy. Your average LLM is not going to offer this and is often more trouble than it is worth in creating briefs and summaries for your lawyers. It is better to apply your own mental effort and work with your lawyers who can advise you on which AI tools are useful and effective for improving efficiency and outcomes and which are not. Often the standard LLM briefing packages you provide counsel are more trouble than they are worth.
