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On May 8, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics issued its formal Opinion 511 entitled Confidentiality Obligations of Lawyers Posting to Listservs. As Bob Ambrogi rightly pointed out in his recent post on the Opinion, it seems odd that the ABA would issue an opinion now about a technology that has been around since the late 90s. For Bob, it brought to mind Rip Van Winkle, who slept for 20 years only to wake up in a unrecognizable world.

I agree that the timing seemed strange. However, the substance of the Opinion could relate to and reveal the Committee’s thinking about the use by lawyers of large language models (LLMs).

The Opinion deals with when a lawyer can post questions or comments on a ListServ without their client’’s “informed consent.” According to the Opinion (and clearly, under the Rules), a lawyer can only do so if there is not a reasonable likelihood that a reader could determine either the identity of the client or the matter. The Opinion also discusses what “informed consent” entails.Continue Reading ABA’s Opinion 511 and Its Impact on Legal Ethics in the AI Era: A Wake Up Call?

Thomson Reuters and WestLaw today announced the release of an enhanced legal research platform called Quick Check as part of their WestLaw Edge suite of products. Quick Check uses sophisticated algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning to search and find better and more relevant cites and authorities to use in legal writing.

It works like this: you upload your document securely into the WestLaw Edge cloud and Quick Check then searches for and provides citations and authorities that you did not include. It arranges these by various headings and into a relevancy hierarchy. It also will tell you whether the citations you have used are troublesome or perhaps not totally on the mark, perhaps triggering some more thought about those citations. According to WestLaw, Quick Check will find highly relevant authority, secondary sources and other related briefs and memoranda to ensure that its customers find what they might have otherwise missed. It will also prepare a Table of Authorities, a pain in the ass portion of any brief no matter who does it.
Continue Reading WestLaw Announces Quick Check

So, as promised in my general post about Legalweek last week, here are my thoughts about the three most innovative and relevant products I saw at this year’s Conference (plus one).

As I said before, none of the three is groundbreaking in and of themselves. None will change the way we fundamentally practice. But taken together and added to any number of other products that are designed to address particular pain points, they collectively move the needle in various ways from efficiency to life balance. This is what good product developers do: they find a problem and try to solve it. Forget saving the world.
Continue Reading New and Hot At Legalweek? Zero. Windtalker. LoopUp. And Casepoint

Today, Google held its #madebygoogle event in New York City and announced 3 new products. While none of these were particularly surprising since they had all been rumored for some time (some tech writers had already been sent some products to review), the announcement was still interesting. And while all three of the new products are primarily designed for home and general customer use, I can see some useful applications for us lawyers.
Continue Reading Made By Google: What’s In It For Lawyers