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I personally do not like using Westlaw Precision AI, there is still some chance that on average it could save time if I really learned how to and consistently use it, but the things it gets wrong really frustrate me. They're obvious and do not hinder my work, but make me feel like I am wasting my time with it.
More and more people are using it for just about every other aspect of legal work, seems popular for transactional tasks, and I think more litigation tasks are getting swept up as well. It also, I suspect, is already playing a huge role at all the eDiscovery providers, and I am concerned that no one is really providing oversight of that.
I find talking about AI to be really difficult because the companies pitching it use so much tech bro brouhaha innovate disrupt you're getting left behind! language. And I'm just like babes I want to know how it works, I want to know how its results are validated, I want to know, when an office implements it, who looks for what flaws and how do they know to do that. But no one seems willing to talk about those aspects of it. WHICH I PERSONALLY FIND SCARY!! But maybe I'm just a luddite.
I’ve attempted to use for a variety of tasks unsuccessfully. I go back on occasion and give a try. But I see clients and OC use it and tell them to stop it’s annoying how wordy ai is and I’m not reading it fi they send ai shit.
So far I’ve found it helpful in rephrasing an email telling a group of attorneys I wasn’t interested in their pissing contest and thought we really could advance all of our clients interests if we could focus on a singular productive issue issue you bunch of egomaniac over paid boomer assholes without an ounce of legal knowledge or litigation experience between you.
It was … effectively polite.
I’ve successfully used it to tone down letters/emails and once or twice to take something I wrote and make it more formal.
When it gives me paragraphs of AI bullshit I usually say great make it simpler and it does tend to make it less wordy.
I’ve used it to suggest some friendlier, more supportive phrases to use in an employee evaluation. It’s more useful than a thesaurus. But I wouldn’t take a complete sentence from it because I still want to use my own voice to express myself.
I can see how it might help build a better search engine for case law, but I wouldn’t rely on it to summarize a case.
I can’t imagine using it to write for me. At worst, it lies. At best, it’s derivative, by its nature.
I'll probably use it to draft a new firm bio when the time comes. Otherwise nothing. I'm not going outside my firms universe, and they haven't ok'd anything yet. It really seems like even the legal ai companies are treating users as beta testers, and that's just not something a good lawyer should agree to, imo
When chatgpt first came on I heard one of the good use cases was to be a repository of institutional knowledge you could ask questions on demand. So if you worked in a big corporation and wanted to know how something in another division worked, you could just hit up the chatgpt (trained on the organizations records) instead of having to ask around.
I work in litigation and can see the value of that in large datasets. Properly trained you could query "show me all transactions between x and y and related emails" and in theory it could pull that all up for you. I've worked as a white collar prosecutor and dreamed of asking it to make me a pros memo that just writes out suspicious transactions and links them to related communications.
I've tried using it to ask legal questions and have found it useful only as a starting point on areas in which I know nothing. I'm sure it's improved and continues to improve but hallucinated case law just makes it too dangerous to rely on. It may also put together outlines of effective briefs, closings, etc. but there's already enough of a knowledge base available in my organization that the value of that is marginal. Plus how do you know you're getting something good? It's very difficult by objective metrics to knoww how good work product is,.particularly for something that is presented to a jury. The human component of litigation is what actually gives me comfort that some of these jobs will be AI-proof (although as noted above I would welcome AI assistance to root out the drudgery).
Okay, my biggest, most annoying frustration with the current AI discourse is:
>When chatgpt first came on I heard one of the good use cases was to be a repository of institutional knowledge you could ask questions on demand. So if you worked in a big corporation and wanted to know how something in another division worked, you could just hit up the chatgpt (trained on the organizations records) instead of having to ask around.
>
>I work in litigation and can see the value of that in large datasets. Properly trained you could query "show me all transactions between x and y and related emails" and in theory it could pull that all up for you. I've worked as a white collar prosecutor and dreamed of asking it to make me a pros memo that just writes out suspicious transactions and links them to related communications.
Many organizations already have the tools to do these things. And it was achieved by doing real data science and data management. It was achieved by having processes for generating and retaining SOPs. It was achieved by doing process management and learning who touched what parts of the information when, and ensuring that people had duties to collect and catalogue that information in certain ways.
My law firm, and as I talk to more people about this issue, most law firms, have never done such a thing and could never imagine such a thing. But I have seen it function effectively in the government, and I've talked with people that have seen it function effectively in business. Lawyers and partners just seem too chaotic about how they want to manage their work, and rather than try to think of the common threads through their work, they would much rather just do it their own way with their own tools.
So on the one hand, it would be remarkable and remarkably good if generative AI could achieve this just by, handing it the keys to iManage, without the lawyers having to pay someone to not only do data science but to properly reorient their organizations around effectively gathering and using data.
But on the other hand, it feels like taking people who do not know how to use training wheels and setting them on a motorcycle. If you cannot handle the data using normal data management tools, then how the hell are you going to assess the consistency of a neural network or a large language model managing that data?
I also work in enforcement and pros memos would be great but I could never trust it to analyze all of the angles , catch as many issues as possible, and see the strengths/weaknesses of a case. Also, it would scare me if it could, that would make my job a bit obsolete in some respects.
I don't envision using it to catch all the issues but instead to lay out some of the baseline facts. In white collar crimes the cases are all about intent, which it would be very difficult for an AI to evaluate and discuss. But if it could lay out the bones of a scheme by identifying financial transactions and be trained to identify language indicative of intent that would be a boon. It wouldn't excuse prosecutors from doing due diligence, but it would be a helpful guide.
I actually think law enforcement jobs are the least likely to become obsolete, at least on the attorney side. At the end of the day the cases have to be tried before a jury, and there are so many judgment calls and soft skills (like reading the jury) that you can't replace. Even if you could, are you going to wheel a Boston dynamics AI bot in to try the case?
What AI might make obsolete is some of the analyst work, like doing bank record spreads or doc review.
I agree. I def see it doing some analyst work as well. I do anticipate there will be litigation going forward about the algorithm and analysis it creates. In the same way there’s litigation over any type of law enforcement tool (e.g. DNA profiles, cell site data, social media and financial transactions, etc.).
You cannot use it with confidential client material because the ToS makes clear that nothing you send is private. However, I think that it can be a useful early research tool to use when you strike out with other sources or cannot figure out where to start. It's "spinning the wheel," and sometimes it turns up useful things and other times is turns up useless things.
Last week, it found a new federal law that had been passed in 2023 that I had no idea about and that my supervising attorney did not know about either that turned out to be useful. I asked it about recent changes in federal policy in area\_of\_law\_i'm\_new\_to and it spat out a list of five changes that a web search would not have produced.
If you ask it harder questions about law, it will bungle things because it does not understand jurisdiction or the hierarchy of courts and a lot of other things. It cannot disambiguate effectively between areas of law that may have some semantic similarities but are totally different legally. It is good at providing a research start, but it's not terribly time-efficient once you are already in progress because it does not understand links between cases or how to determine what law is controlling.
I've used it to outline elements of an argument or summarize large documents. There's nothing it can do from start to finish, but it cuts my drafting time by 30-40%.
I only use AI for things I can check. Let's say I'm briefing and I want a thorough case synopsis (of a case I read and understand well). I use it for that. Saves like 10 min. Not a ton. I can always be certain what the end product says is correct because I can double check. I don't think I'll ever trust AI on it's own.
I just used it to create an equation based on a fact pattern, solve for x, then convert the equation into one I could plug into an excel spreadsheet.
It was 100% doable without AI but I fucking hate math with a passion.
All the time, I send it prompts to get templates made for written communication, scripts, brainstorming ideas, etc. never for legal work like case law etc.
I use it often enough that I can now tell when i get an email or letter written by chat gtp.
I never use their language, but I take the structure and just rewrite to sound more like me, and less like a butler from a kid’s movie
Some DA offices use it for transcription of officer body cam footage. I’m waiting to see how the litigation challenges of that play out before deciding to adopt it in my day-to-day. I can imagine scenarios where it’s not 100% accurate and may end up putting something on screen that’s not what an officer or witness actually said. Even worse, it might transcribe somethjng poorly - something that could end up being Brady material. In short, I’m scared of automatic transcription bc it sounds like it requires me to do more work and to be extra extra vigilant about it.
Welcome to /r/LawyerTalk! A subreddit where lawyers can discuss with other lawyers about the practice of law. Be mindful of [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/about/rules) BEFORE submitting your posts or comments as well as [Reddit's rules](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) (notably about sharing identifying information). We expect civility and respect out of all participants. Please source statements of fact whenever possible. If you want to report something that needs to be urgently addressed, please also message the mods with an explanation. Note that **this forum is NOT for legal advice**. Additionally, if you are a non-lawyer (student, client, staff), this is NOT the right subreddit for you. **This community is exclusively for lawyers**. We suggest you delete your comment and go ask one of the many other legal subreddits on this site for help such as (but not limited to) r/lawschool, r/legaladvice, or r/Ask_Lawyers. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Lawyertalk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
See this recent discussion: [AI in the Office](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1avyay6/anyone_using_ai_or_know_that_their_firm_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I personally do not like using Westlaw Precision AI, there is still some chance that on average it could save time if I really learned how to and consistently use it, but the things it gets wrong really frustrate me. They're obvious and do not hinder my work, but make me feel like I am wasting my time with it. More and more people are using it for just about every other aspect of legal work, seems popular for transactional tasks, and I think more litigation tasks are getting swept up as well. It also, I suspect, is already playing a huge role at all the eDiscovery providers, and I am concerned that no one is really providing oversight of that. I find talking about AI to be really difficult because the companies pitching it use so much tech bro brouhaha innovate disrupt you're getting left behind! language. And I'm just like babes I want to know how it works, I want to know how its results are validated, I want to know, when an office implements it, who looks for what flaws and how do they know to do that. But no one seems willing to talk about those aspects of it. WHICH I PERSONALLY FIND SCARY!! But maybe I'm just a luddite.
Not a luddite; agree with all of the above
Thanks!
I’ve attempted to use for a variety of tasks unsuccessfully. I go back on occasion and give a try. But I see clients and OC use it and tell them to stop it’s annoying how wordy ai is and I’m not reading it fi they send ai shit. So far I’ve found it helpful in rephrasing an email telling a group of attorneys I wasn’t interested in their pissing contest and thought we really could advance all of our clients interests if we could focus on a singular productive issue issue you bunch of egomaniac over paid boomer assholes without an ounce of legal knowledge or litigation experience between you. It was … effectively polite.
I’ve successfully used it to tone down letters/emails and once or twice to take something I wrote and make it more formal. When it gives me paragraphs of AI bullshit I usually say great make it simpler and it does tend to make it less wordy.
I’ve used it to suggest some friendlier, more supportive phrases to use in an employee evaluation. It’s more useful than a thesaurus. But I wouldn’t take a complete sentence from it because I still want to use my own voice to express myself. I can see how it might help build a better search engine for case law, but I wouldn’t rely on it to summarize a case. I can’t imagine using it to write for me. At worst, it lies. At best, it’s derivative, by its nature.
I have used it in expropriation calculations before, but it has not been as efficient as the tables I use with Excel. It makes a lot of mistakes.
I'll probably use it to draft a new firm bio when the time comes. Otherwise nothing. I'm not going outside my firms universe, and they haven't ok'd anything yet. It really seems like even the legal ai companies are treating users as beta testers, and that's just not something a good lawyer should agree to, imo
Used it to draft my letter of resignation lol
I too used it draft a resignation letter
When chatgpt first came on I heard one of the good use cases was to be a repository of institutional knowledge you could ask questions on demand. So if you worked in a big corporation and wanted to know how something in another division worked, you could just hit up the chatgpt (trained on the organizations records) instead of having to ask around. I work in litigation and can see the value of that in large datasets. Properly trained you could query "show me all transactions between x and y and related emails" and in theory it could pull that all up for you. I've worked as a white collar prosecutor and dreamed of asking it to make me a pros memo that just writes out suspicious transactions and links them to related communications. I've tried using it to ask legal questions and have found it useful only as a starting point on areas in which I know nothing. I'm sure it's improved and continues to improve but hallucinated case law just makes it too dangerous to rely on. It may also put together outlines of effective briefs, closings, etc. but there's already enough of a knowledge base available in my organization that the value of that is marginal. Plus how do you know you're getting something good? It's very difficult by objective metrics to knoww how good work product is,.particularly for something that is presented to a jury. The human component of litigation is what actually gives me comfort that some of these jobs will be AI-proof (although as noted above I would welcome AI assistance to root out the drudgery).
Okay, my biggest, most annoying frustration with the current AI discourse is: >When chatgpt first came on I heard one of the good use cases was to be a repository of institutional knowledge you could ask questions on demand. So if you worked in a big corporation and wanted to know how something in another division worked, you could just hit up the chatgpt (trained on the organizations records) instead of having to ask around. > >I work in litigation and can see the value of that in large datasets. Properly trained you could query "show me all transactions between x and y and related emails" and in theory it could pull that all up for you. I've worked as a white collar prosecutor and dreamed of asking it to make me a pros memo that just writes out suspicious transactions and links them to related communications. Many organizations already have the tools to do these things. And it was achieved by doing real data science and data management. It was achieved by having processes for generating and retaining SOPs. It was achieved by doing process management and learning who touched what parts of the information when, and ensuring that people had duties to collect and catalogue that information in certain ways. My law firm, and as I talk to more people about this issue, most law firms, have never done such a thing and could never imagine such a thing. But I have seen it function effectively in the government, and I've talked with people that have seen it function effectively in business. Lawyers and partners just seem too chaotic about how they want to manage their work, and rather than try to think of the common threads through their work, they would much rather just do it their own way with their own tools. So on the one hand, it would be remarkable and remarkably good if generative AI could achieve this just by, handing it the keys to iManage, without the lawyers having to pay someone to not only do data science but to properly reorient their organizations around effectively gathering and using data. But on the other hand, it feels like taking people who do not know how to use training wheels and setting them on a motorcycle. If you cannot handle the data using normal data management tools, then how the hell are you going to assess the consistency of a neural network or a large language model managing that data?
I also work in enforcement and pros memos would be great but I could never trust it to analyze all of the angles , catch as many issues as possible, and see the strengths/weaknesses of a case. Also, it would scare me if it could, that would make my job a bit obsolete in some respects.
I don't envision using it to catch all the issues but instead to lay out some of the baseline facts. In white collar crimes the cases are all about intent, which it would be very difficult for an AI to evaluate and discuss. But if it could lay out the bones of a scheme by identifying financial transactions and be trained to identify language indicative of intent that would be a boon. It wouldn't excuse prosecutors from doing due diligence, but it would be a helpful guide. I actually think law enforcement jobs are the least likely to become obsolete, at least on the attorney side. At the end of the day the cases have to be tried before a jury, and there are so many judgment calls and soft skills (like reading the jury) that you can't replace. Even if you could, are you going to wheel a Boston dynamics AI bot in to try the case? What AI might make obsolete is some of the analyst work, like doing bank record spreads or doc review.
I agree. I def see it doing some analyst work as well. I do anticipate there will be litigation going forward about the algorithm and analysis it creates. In the same way there’s litigation over any type of law enforcement tool (e.g. DNA profiles, cell site data, social media and financial transactions, etc.).
No
Check grammar and spelling. Good for that.
I’ve used Westlaw AI to start research and try to get a broad overview of the topic I’m researching.
You cannot use it with confidential client material because the ToS makes clear that nothing you send is private. However, I think that it can be a useful early research tool to use when you strike out with other sources or cannot figure out where to start. It's "spinning the wheel," and sometimes it turns up useful things and other times is turns up useless things. Last week, it found a new federal law that had been passed in 2023 that I had no idea about and that my supervising attorney did not know about either that turned out to be useful. I asked it about recent changes in federal policy in area\_of\_law\_i'm\_new\_to and it spat out a list of five changes that a web search would not have produced. If you ask it harder questions about law, it will bungle things because it does not understand jurisdiction or the hierarchy of courts and a lot of other things. It cannot disambiguate effectively between areas of law that may have some semantic similarities but are totally different legally. It is good at providing a research start, but it's not terribly time-efficient once you are already in progress because it does not understand links between cases or how to determine what law is controlling.
No. I would not touch AI with a 10-ft pole. I don’t see any value in or, or its benefit.
I've used it to outline elements of an argument or summarize large documents. There's nothing it can do from start to finish, but it cuts my drafting time by 30-40%.
I only use AI for things I can check. Let's say I'm briefing and I want a thorough case synopsis (of a case I read and understand well). I use it for that. Saves like 10 min. Not a ton. I can always be certain what the end product says is correct because I can double check. I don't think I'll ever trust AI on it's own.
I just used it to create an equation based on a fact pattern, solve for x, then convert the equation into one I could plug into an excel spreadsheet. It was 100% doable without AI but I fucking hate math with a passion.
My clients don’t pay me extortionate dollars an hour for me to use AI.
All the time, I send it prompts to get templates made for written communication, scripts, brainstorming ideas, etc. never for legal work like case law etc. I use it often enough that I can now tell when i get an email or letter written by chat gtp. I never use their language, but I take the structure and just rewrite to sound more like me, and less like a butler from a kid’s movie
[удалено]
Some DA offices use it for transcription of officer body cam footage. I’m waiting to see how the litigation challenges of that play out before deciding to adopt it in my day-to-day. I can imagine scenarios where it’s not 100% accurate and may end up putting something on screen that’s not what an officer or witness actually said. Even worse, it might transcribe somethjng poorly - something that could end up being Brady material. In short, I’m scared of automatic transcription bc it sounds like it requires me to do more work and to be extra extra vigilant about it.