We are at a stage in the development of artificial intelligence where everything feels amazing and scary at the same time.
Amazingly, GPT-4, the large-scale language model that powers ChatGPT, passed the bar exam earlier this year. Lawyers in their 50s still have nightmares about passing the bar exam, but it was easy for generative AI. GPT-4 scores were in the 90th percentile, or the top 10% of humanity.
And on the scary side, the attorney who filed the legal brief ChatGPT prepared in federal court, filled with bogus lawsuits and citations made by ChatGPT.
For all the doom and gloom around AI, Michael Semanchik has a very compelling use case for turning things around.
“Think about how the average 16.5 years for a wrongfully convicted and incarcerated person can be calculated to bring it closer to perhaps four years,” Semanczyk said.
Semanczyk is the lead attorney for the California Innocence Project, a nonprofit that freed 40 people wrongfully imprisoned, some serving life sentences.
“We have six lawyers,” he said. “Several attorneys in our firm actually share an office, and our budget is limited.”
Semanczyk said his office receives about 800 requests for help each year, as well as more than 4,000 pieces of mail that the interns have to sort. Paralegals cost money.
That’s why when a company asked him if he wanted to pilot a new AI legal assistant, he agreed to test it.
“Dear AI, please read this case file, hundreds of pages of police reports and records,” Semanczyk said. “Please tell me, is this victim witness consistent in identifying my client?”
It would take a human lawyer about a month to do all this, he said.
AI? After 10 minutes it returned accurate results.
Semanczyk said much of the reason it takes so long to prove a client’s innocence is this kind of tedious work, not necessarily the appeals process.
“We’re getting to the point where lawyers are obliged to use AI,” Semanczyk said.
There are already many legal AI products specifically for law firms. Legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw have AI-branded products.
Jake Heller is the CEO of Casetext. His company manufactures his CoCounsel, an AI used by the California Innocence Project. For commercial companies, it costs $500 per user per month.
Amid all these stories about ChatGPT hallucinations, much of Heller’s job is to reassure interested lawyers that his AI is not a hoax.
“We base everything written there on real documents, real databases, real information. said Heller.
Legal AI tools can summarize thousands of emails and texts for document review, recommend deposition questions, and create technical legal research notes.
All of this should lead to fewer billable hours and cheaper legal services. Focus on “what to do”.
“The goal, especially for large law firms, is to keep the money train going,” said Sharon Nelson, a law firm attorney and technology consultant. “So how do you do that? They’ll figure out how.”
Nelson, who began his career in the 1970s, said he had seen parts of the film before.
“You know, when we were computerized, everybody said we would have less bills,” Nelson said. “It didn’t work. It didn’t work. And I’m pretty sure this won’t work either.”
But when Microsoft Word came out, it was no longer possible to write to the other lawyer. Or follow commands such as making characters more aggressive.
Evan Shenkman, chief innovation officer at Fisher-Phillips, a national employment law firm that was an early adopter of legal AI, said lawyers and paralegals have been raving about AI so far. They mostly use it as a starting point for legal research, after which humans take over.
“[The AI is] I was convinced some of them were Luddites,” Shekman said. “They told me, ‘Look, I’m not doing my own legal research anymore.’ Now we use CoCounsel and pass the results to our associates or paralegals to ‘look into the matter further.’ please.” ”
No one has yet accused Shekman of trying to replace them with robots. And there are some very human lawyer jobs that CoCounsel doesn’t like. Like coming up with an AI lawyer joke.
Schenkman didn’t expect it to come up. But sure enough, after a failed start…
“Why did AI lawyers refuse to take new cases? Because they couldn’t do the math.”
It’s probably best to let ComedyGPT handle every lawyer joke that comes up.
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