He Inquiring Lawyer
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 24 |
July 2023
DEPARTMENT
Who Can Write a Better Brief: Chat AI or a Recent Law School Graduate?
Part 1
BY RONALD M. SANDGRUND
"Lawyers' jobs are a lot less safe than we think."[1]
"Law is seen as the lucrative profession perhaps most at risk from the recent advances in A.I. because lawyers are essentially word merchants."[2]
"No, lawyers won't be replaced by artificial intelligence. Yet. Give it a few years."[3]
"The notoriously change-averse legal industry will face a particularly abrupt disruption by AI."[4]
Law firms "fail to appreciate how quickly the pace of exponential change can be."[5]
"Firms too slow to adapt to AI . . . will suffer a competitive disadvantage."[6]
"AI will replace lawyers . . . who fail to adapt with it."[7]
"It may even be considered legal malpractice not to use AI one day."[8]
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"[9]
This is the tenth article series by The InQuiring Lawyer addressing a topic that Colorado lawyers may discuss privately but rarely talk about publicly. The topics in this column are explored through dialogues with lawyers, judges, law professors, law students, and law school deans, as well as entrepreneurs, computer scientists, programmers, journalists, business leaders, politicians, economists, sociologists, mental health professionals, academics, children, gadflies, and know-it-alls (myself included). If you have an idea for a future column, I hope you will share it with me via email at rms.sandgrund@ gmail.com.
This two-part article examines whether lawyers will soon be replaced by machines and, more important, whether the InQuiring Lawyer's days as a columnist are numbered. Part 1 consists of an interview with Professor Harry Surden, a nationally known law professor, former software engineer, and expert on the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and legal practice. Also weighing in is ChatGPT-3.5, an artificial language program. Part 2 will feature The InQuiring Lawyer's version of a battle rap, giving readers the opportunity to compare the wit and wisdom of The InQuiring Lawyer and ChatGPT as expressed in their parallel humorous essays about lawyers.
Introduction
Did the quotes at the start of this article get your attention? Did they strike you as tech hype? Fear-mongering? Just clickbait for lawyers?
I love science fiction books and movies about the coming l'apocalypse de la machine. I feasted on Isaac Asimov's Robot series, with its three laws of robotics[10]—instructions built into robots so they don't harm humans—and its chief protagonist R. Daneel Olivaw, a humanoid detective who helps solve murders involving apparent violations of the three laws. Two of my favorite movies are Blade Runner, based on Phillip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ridley Scott's Alien. In both movies, androids create more than a few problems for their creators. And I loved James Cameron's The Terminator, involving an existential war across time between humans and their creation, Skynet,[11] and Skynet's cyborgs. Standing as a beacon of hope are Data, from Star Trek the Next Generation, and R2-D2, C-3PO, and BB-8, from Star Wars, who serve faithfully alongside their human creators. Not so much HAL.[12]
But I digress.
This dialogue may seem a bit pedestrian in the shadow of these monumental science fiction works, but it concerns an issue that should be creeping onto every lawyer's and law firm's radar screens: the encroachment by—or maybe, more hopefully, a collaboration with—AI. Word processing, e-discovery, and searchable legal databases were all adopted during my legal career, and each had profound effects on the day-to-day practice of law, legal ethics, the business of law, and the attorney job market. Many of us recall the gross inefficiencies of practicing law in the 20th century: (1) typing (and retyping) briefs and contracts on paper using a typewriter; (2) employing Wite-Out®; (3) printing, copying, and snail-mailing legal briefs to opposing counsel and the court; (4) tunneling through boxes of court-stored paper files; (5) hiring persons called "legal secretaries" to type one's handwritten notes and dictation onto paper; (6) sending letters to opposing counsel using something called the "US Post Office," and wondering if they ever arrived and whether, in a week or two, you might get a response; (7) driving to a law library to conduct legal research, including wading through volumes and volumes of Shepard's Citations to see if that fantastic case you are relying on has been overruled; and (8) spending weeks arranging your client's dusty and creased business records in chronological order and then reading them line by line to see if there was anything relevant or privileged in there.
For newer lawyers snickering at these examples, I ask: Are you ready for the day when an AI program could write a brief or a contract that is far better than anything you could produce? What if you can't afford to purchase the AI program? And what about your kids: will you be encouraging them to go to law school if it looks like AI will be performing over 50% of the work lawyers currently perform?
All of which raises the question whether we are at an inflection point, like when seemingly overnight tens of thousands of horses were put out to pasture following the arrival of the mass-produced automobile in 1910, or when thousands of elevator operators looked for new jobs after the widespread acceptance of automatic elevators in 1950, or when most travel agents went extinct in the early 2000s. Hello Expedia, Kayak, and Booking.com!
There are dozens and dozens of practical, legal, ethical, moral, and business issues tied up in AI performing legal and judicial tasks, from writing contracts, to interviewing potential clients online or virtually via holograms (did you know that research shows that clients are often more honest talking to a robot than a human?[13]), to predicting the settlement value of a personal injury case, to determining appropriate bail and jail sentences untainted by cognitive and structural biases,[14] to providing access to justice to hundreds of thousands of folks who cannot find or afford a lawyer willing to help them, to—well, the list is quite long.
To keep things simple, this dialogue will focus mainly on a singular legal task that large language models using AI may soon perform as well or better lawyers: writing a motion and brief addressing discrete legal issues. ChatGPT's utility in transactional work will not to be addressed here. (I heard from one reliable source that a Big Law partner reviewed a first draft of a merger agreement created by ChatGPT and reported it was as good or better than any first draft he had seen.)
Participants
ChatGPT is a computer program. I interviewed version GPT-3.5. Version GPT-4 is now available as a subscription service.
The InQuiring Lawyer is a human being with an opinion on everything.
Professor Harry Surden is a human being. He is also a professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He joined the faculty in 2008. His scholarship focuses on legal informatics, AI and law (including machine learning and law), legal automation, and issues concerning self-driving/autonomous vehicles. He also studies intellectual property law with a substantive focus on patents and copyright, and information privacy law. Before joining CU, Professor Surden was a resident fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX) at Stanford Law School. In that capacity, Professor Surden conducted interdisciplinary research with collaborators from the Stanford School of Engineering exploring the application of computer technology toward improving the legal system. Before attending law school, Professor Surden worked as a software engineer for Cisco Systems and Bloomberg L.P.
A Glimpse Into the Future
The InQuiring Lawyer: Professor Surden, could you tell us why you transitioned from software engineer to attorney and law professor?
Professor Harry Surden: I was always interested in both the technical and social science and humanities side of topics. As an undergraduate, I took a broad range of courses, studying computer science as well as political science, philosophy, and even an undergraduate law course. When I graduated and entered the world of software engineering, working first in finance at Bloomberg L.P. and then at Cisco Systems, I found it fascinating working with and programming these vast and complex computer systems. Particularly at Bloomberg, as a software engineer, I saw how technology was transforming finance in the late 1990s. One thought in the back of my mind was the idea that a similar transformation could somehow impact law as well, perhaps empowering the public and, hopefully, bettering society. After several years as a software engineer, I decided to pursue the other, nontechnical side of my interests, by pursuing a law degree at Stanford. My hope was that I could eventually become a law professor and combine my two interests, studying artificial intelligence and law. There, with the support of several professors, I helped cofound CodeX in 2005. Since then, my excellent colleagues have been pursuing this goal.
InQ: Why does AI interest you as a law professor?
Prof. Surden: There are a few reasons. One is the idea that we may be able to use the technology to help those who are underserved by lawyers. By some accounts, 80% of people in the United States who need legal assistance are unable to obtain or afford it. One approach would be to fully fund legal help for all those who need it. But it has been 50-plus years, and our country does not seem to want to do that. Another idea in the back of my mind was that perhaps AI or other similar technologies could help bridge this access to justice gap...
To continue reading
Request your trial