#legalethics

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We have all heard over and over again about lawyers who use Gen AI and fail to check the citations the tools provide. The dangers of hallucinations and inaccuracies when using Gen AI tools are well known, and a Court will likely have little sympathy for the lawyer who fails to check sources.

But what if an expert witness uses Gen AI to come up with nonexistent citations to support their declarations or testimony?

That very thing just happened in a case pending in Minnesota federal court, as reported by Luis Rijo in an article in PPC Land. Ironically, the expert in question, Professor Jeff Hancock, the Stanford Social Media Lab Director, offered a declaration in a case challenging the validity of a Minnesota statute regulating deepfake content in political campaigns. Hancock subsequently admitted using ChatGPT to help draft his declaration. The declaration included two citations to nonexistent academic articles and incorrectly attributed the authors in another citation.Continue Reading Did Your Expert Use ChatGPT? You Might Want to Ask

To whom much is given, much is required.

Several years ago, my firm held a departure party for me as I transitioned from the full-time practice of law to full-time blogger and legal tech commenter. One of my peers, who I had practiced with for most of my career, walked up to me and said, “I sure wish I could do what you are doing.” I had known this guy most of my career and knew he had the resources to do something else and had expressed the desire to do so several times. So I said, Dave, there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same thing. He replied, I just can’t. Being a lawyer is not what I do, its who I am.Continue Reading Why Lawyers Can’t Let Go: Identity, Privilege and The Impact on Clients

With any new technology, questions of discovery and privilege inevitably arise. As a recent New Mexico case demonstrates, that’s certainly true of Gen AI.

The Tremblay Case

The case, Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc., is pending in California District Court. The case involves claims that OpenAI was trained by using plaintiffs’ copyright materials. OpenAI sought to compel the plaintiffs to produce and obtain the prompts and responses the OpenAI tool used in pre-suit testing, including those responses the plaintiffs did not use to support their claims. Continue Reading Privilege In the Age of Gen AI: Lots of Questions

Earlier this week, the well-known commentator Seth Godin observed,  

“One of the valid complaints about some AI systems is that they make stuff up, with confidence, and without sourcing, and then argue when challenged.

Unsurprisingly, this sounds a lot like people.”

In evaluating whether lawyers should use Gen AI tools, lawyers (and legal commentators, for that matter), often forget that humans (lawyers) make mistakes. They make shit up. As one of my former partners once observed, “So and so may be wrong, but he is never unsure.” And even when wrong, boy, can lawyers argue they are nevertheless right.Continue Reading Gen AI and Law: Perfection Is Not the Point

Much has been written about the ethical duties of a lawyer regarding technology, a duty found in Rule 1.1 (competence), Rule 1.6 (confidentiality), Rule 1.5 (ethical billing) and Rules 5.1 and 5.3 (supervisory responsibilities). These rules and their nuances should in and of themselves be enough for lawyers to be as inquisitive and knowledgeable about tech as they are the substantive law.

But forgetting these for a moment and that technology can generally make us more efficient, there are also some 6 very sound practical reasons lawyers should be familiar with and welcome technology and, as expressed in Comment 8, know of its benefits and risks.
Continue Reading Technological Competence for Lawyers: Six Practical Reasons