We have collectively been figuring out what to do with Artificial Intelligence for a couple of years now. When it first came out in 2023, it was scary and disconcerting to a lot of us and the end of the world felt near (not that the end of the world hasn’t always been about 8-10 years off, regardless of the generation).
As a society, we seem now tuned in to being able to spot a lot of what’s been written by AI. We have all heard the horror stories by now of attorneys using AI and only AI to draft briefs, only for the Court to discover that the cases cited were completely made up and the attorney submitting the brief did not bother to actually read anything that was submitted. That level of laziness and complacency is truly frightening, particularly when you still hear about it happening, and unfortunately casts our entire profession in a bad light. On a less nefarious level, we see AI being employed to draft blog posts and emails, all sounding rather robotic unless the human spends a bit of time making it, well, human. In all of these situations, though, the person using AI is certainly not disclosing its use, and in cases where confidential information is at stake, that in-the-shadows use always makes me nervous.
If you follow the phrase “follow the money”, then AI isn’t going anywhere. It has rapidly been correctly applied as a “thought partner” instead of a “thought leader” in our every-day lives. For about two weeks in August, if you followed the stock market, you heard nothing but anticipation of Nvidia’s Q2 report and what impact it would have not only on it’s own stock (NVDA), but on the stock market as a whole. And just this week, Nvidia announced a $100 BILLION (with a b) investment in OpenAI, causing the bulls to celebrate and some bears to worry it’s too much, too soon. And that’s just one stock. You have several competitors to Nvidia along with a whole host of companies being formed and grown to provide infrastructure support all with significant capital being sent their way as this sector explodes. Yes, the money says AI is here to stay.
We have been steadily implementing and training on AI at The Manely Firm. Not to replace us, because at this point, we can all tell when a bedtime story or legal document has been written by AI. AI may write something different every time you prompt it, but at least at this point, it all has the same robotic, non-human feel to it each time.
We are using it, though, to support the work we are doing for our clients. For example, family law, done well, requires a significant amount of time sifting through documents looking for the needle in the haystack and sometimes not even knowing what that needle is when you go looking. AI won’t always know what the needle is, but we have deployed AI to dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to find the needles we identify. Those needles might be: a monthly $40 purchase from a florist, a one-way ticket for a parent and the children to another country, or a random hotel room booked in town. We are using AI to uncover and find those needles in a shorter amount of time, allowing for our incredibly talented human attorneys and paralegals to spend their time crafting the best strategy to put that needle to use. This is just one of a number of ways we are harnessing AI as a thought partner, as another tool in our toolbox, to provide top level representation to our clients. We are able to utilize AI in these capacities because we have gone to great lengths and costs to have an internal AI program that is on a closed system, meaning no one outside of our organization has access to the data, just like they don’t have access to the files themselves.
If AI is here to stay and it’s being deployed by more and more people in their everyday lives, if you are talking to family law attorneys, I recommend having an upfront conversation about whether and how they use AI and how they secure your information during any consultation you have. I suspect you’ll find that the ones who are using it ethically and responsibly will be really happy to have that conversation.
David Purvis