Questions to Ask Your Law Firms About Their Use of Artificial Intelligence

• Publication year: 2024
• Citation: Vol. 7 No. 5

[Page 357]

William T. Garcia, Matthew D. Coatney, and Julie D. Honor ^*

In this article, the authors offer a number of questions that a client might ask its lawyers about their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI.

Even the most casual observer of current news appreciates the projected use of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve service delivery across a variety of industries. AI techniques such as natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning have been commercially available for several years and are incorporated into some of the more widely adopted software applications (for example, Lex Machina, which analyzes court dockets to predict case timing and judges' penchants).

The more recent maelstrom involves the use of a species of AI called "generative AI" (GenAI). GenAI is a subset of deep learning (a sophisticated subfield of machine learning) that, based on a user "prompt" (i.e., query or request), creates new images, computer code, video, audio, or natural language based on enormous amounts of data analyzed to train the algorithm. GenAI is designed to generate content—it is not an editor, not an analytic tool (yet), and not a web browser. It does not necessarily operate in "real time": it may be basing its work off ingested materials that are...