I have been reading more and more articles about lawyers using AI to do their jobs. This, in my mind, is malpractice. The whole point of lawyering is to think; offloading that to some LLM makes no sense at all.
AI/LLMs aren’t even good at it, actually. There are more cases every day where a lawyer gets sanctioned for submitting a brief with fake citations. These are irritatingly called “AI hallucinations,” something that implies sentience and which the machines do not actually have. Whatever, these errors happen often. The tools produce answers their creators think we want–what will make us pleased. Need a citation to say what your client did was okay but there really isn’t a case that says that? No problem, one will be invented. Ugh!
Why use a tool when it can’t even do what it is supposed to with any accuracy and without legitimacy?
I won’t. In fact, I feel confident in saying I will NEVER use AI in my practice. I got rid of my Microsoft 365 subscription when it forced Copilot into its tools. I turned off Apple Intelligence. I am now running my practice using tools that reside on my devices, not the “cloud” and which do not access any LLM/AI-tool that I am aware of. My bookkeeping, trust accounting, case management…all of it is done offline. Research is necessarily online, but even there I try to use non-AI or the least AI-assisted tools available (this is getting harder but is something lawyers really should be fighting).
And it all works, in my opinion, better.
What you get when you hire me, then, is someone who writes all her own emails, letters, briefs, filings, and even blog posts. My work product is made by me, period. It is my brain that researches the law, the facts, and puts the pieces together to tell your story, argues your case, negotiates and persuades. If I cite a case it is because I have read the actual case and think it applies, not because some LLM has spit out a summary of it to give me what, in its digital mind, is a pleasing answer.
AI/LLMs promise speed and increased work volume–a lawyer can handle more cases with these tools, we are sold. But, in my book, I would rather be a better, more human lawyer than one with a gazillion cases. I am rather like an artisanal worker, like the guys who made and installed some windows in my 100-year-old house: the windows were custom made and fitted with extreme care. Your matters matter to me, and I will always do my best to give each matter the full attention it deserves, not offload my work to some digital tool that, frankly, is incapable of caring.
I care. It is why I became a lawyer in the first place.