Artificial Intelligence

Lawyers have a duty to: 
   * Competence: Stay up-to-date on AI's benefits and risks, understanding its capabilities and limitations.
   * Confidentiality: Protect client information when using AI tools.
   * Truthful Communication: Be transparent with clients about AI use and avoid misleading statements.

GAI tools raise novel ethical considerations due to their ability to generate new content.
   * Lawyers must stay informed about emerging AI-related ethical issues.
   * Potential for bias in AI exists, and lawyers must take steps to mitigate it.

• AI tools can be used to:
  • Draft and review legal documents
  • Automate storage and retrieval of legal documents
  • Analyze large amounts of legal data and sources for legal research
  • Quickly review documents
  • Analyze past case law, court decisions, and judge rulings
  • Help to assess potential risks and advise clients
  • Facilitate filing and sorting files, case management, scheduling, and timekeeping. 
  • Assist with reading and summarizing documents, finding patterns and discrepancies, and extracting relevant data
  • Automate routine tasks (billing, scheduling, and client management) 

• AI tools are known to "hallucinate" or generate erroneous results, and there are ethical concerns. As one example, there is a famous case involving two New York lawyers who were sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in a legal brief.1
• Many AI tools are "trained" using the information that is uploaded into them, which creates issues of security and privacy.
• Use of information obtained through AI results may be violation of copyright law.

1 Merken, S.(2023, June 26). New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/