AI, legal tech and legal education expert Sean Harrington discusses the complex challenges of new lawyers now learning powerful systems on the job, often without clear institutional guidance, shared professional norms, or confidence in their own ability to supervise the output.
The majority of law firm employees are using AI with virtually no guidance or guardrails. How does your law firm compare? Do you have an AI policy in place, and have you educated your staff about appropriate AI usage? Nicole Black explains drafting AI governance isn’t as difficult as it might seem, and there’s no better time than now to get started.
Over the past several days Rebecca Fordon has been digging into the Claude for Word add-in, and the headline finding surprised her. On document-intensive legal work — cite-checking, consistency review, Table of Authorities assembly — it seems to need less supervision than either Claude on the web or Claude Code. Four tests bear that out, with limits worth knowing.
Michael Berman addresses benchmarks used for AI legal research platforms in the context of the risk of hallucinations in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI outputs. As Berman states, verification, of course, is not only good advice, but also an ethical mandate.
Jennifer Ellis documents the step-by-step process and prompts she used to create an effective ChatGPT PowerPoint presentation on cybersecurity. This template is applicable to multiple subject matters. Ellis allows highlights relevant sources and tools for attorneys to use to create AI generated PowerPoints.
Stephen Embry and Melissa Rogozinski challenge the assumption fueling the explosion of AI use in legal is that it will save gobs of time. These savings will inure to the benefit of lawyers and clients, will lead to fairer methods of billing like alternative fee structures, will get better results, improve access to justice, and lead to ‘world peace’. Well, maybe even the vendors would not go so far as to guarantee the last one. But vendors do seem to be guaranteeing everything but that. And pundits talk as if AI will transform legal from the ground up. Law firms are buying into the hype, investing in expensive systems that do things they barely understand. See also Part I of their article here.
Heather Suttie is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on legal market strategy and management of legal services firms. In this article she addresses how artificial intelligence, pricing, and transience of the legal service sector’s workforce will cause the traditional law firm pyramid structure to rollover like an upending iceberg. The result? By 2030, global legal services will operate much differently than they do now.
Attorney, legal tech expert, author, writer and educator Jerry Lawson shares an interview about his background, his career as a civil service lawyer, and his extensive contributions to continuing legal education programs from the nascent World Wide Web to present day innovations in AI technology.
Referencing decades of experience as a presenter and an attendee at presentations, Jerry Lawson cautions us not to begin a presentation with an apology, which can be compelled by a tech glitch or some other reason not within our control. Lawson states that the habit of beginning with an apology is so old that it has a name in Medieval rhetoric, the captatio benevolentiae, meaning an attempt to capture the audience’s goodwill. Most importantly, It doesn’t work. Lawson highlights a range of scenarios for which an apology or no apology, are appropriate. His lesson applies to far more than presentations, as these reactions are common in a work environment where they may indeed not serve your objectives.
Jennifer (Greig) Wondracek identified that her AI results are much better when she stops and thinks them through, providing a high level of detail and a good explanation of what she want the AI system to produce. So, good law librarian that she is, she created a new form of plan for those who are learning to draft a prompt. And the result is the AI prompt worksheets she shares in this article.