Next month, I’m privileged to be presenting on two topics with United States District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, a dear friend who sits in the Western District of Texas (San Antonio). One of those topics is “Practical Applications for AI.” The longstanding custom for continuing legal education in Texas is that a presenter must offer “high quality written materials” to go with a talk. I’m indebted to this obligation because writing is hard work and without the need to supply original scholarship, I’d probably have produced a fraction of what I’ve published over forty years. A new topic meant a new paper, especially as I was the proponent of the topic in the planning stage–an ask borne of frustration. After two years of AI pushing everything else aside, I was frustrated by the dearth of practical guidance available to trial lawyers–particularly seasoned elders–who want to use AI but fear looking foolish…or worse. So, I took a shot at a practical primer for litigators and am reasonably pleased with the result. Download it here. For some it will be too advanced and for others too basic; but I’m hopeful it hits the sweet spot for many non-technical trial lawyers who don’t want to be left behind.

Despite high-profile instances of lawyers getting into trouble by failing to use LLMs responsibly, there’s a compelling case for using AI in your trial practice now, even if only as a timesaver in document generation and summarization—tasks where AI’s abilities are uncanny and undeniable. But HOW to get started?

The Litigation Section of the State Bar of Texas devoted the Winter 2024 issue of The Advocate magazine to Artificial Intelligence.  Every article was well-written and well-informed—several penned by close friends—but no article, not one, was practical in the sense of helping lawyers use AI in their work. That struck me as an unmet need.

As I looked around, I found no articles geared to guiding trial lawyers who want to use LLMs safely and strategically. I wanted to call the article “The Leery Lawyer’s Guide to AI,” but I knew it would be insufficiently comprehensive. Instead, I’ve sought to help readers get started by highlighting important considerations and illustrating a few applications that they can try now with minimal skill, anxiety or expense. LLMs won’t replace professional judgment, but they can frame issues, suggest language, and break down complex doctrines into plain English explanations. In truth, they can do just about anything that a mastery of facts and language can achieve.

But Know This…

LLMs are unlike any tech tool you’ve used before. Most of the digital technology in our lives is characterized by consistency: you put the same things in, and other things come out in a rigid and replicable fashion. Not so with LLMs. Ask ChatGPT the same question multiple times, and you’ll get a somewhat different answer each time. That takes getting used to. 

Additionally, there’s no single “right” way to interrogate ChatGPT to be assured of an optimal result. That is, there is no strict programming language or set of keywords calculated to achieve a goal. There are a myriad number of ways to successfully elicit information from ChatGPT, and in stark contrast to the inflexible and unforgiving tech tools of the past, the easiest way to get the results you want is to interact with ChatGPT in a natural, conversational fashion.

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