ChatGPT has revolutionized day-to-day work in a variety of industries in the last two years. And while this new technology can be a great way to streamline work processes, ChatGPT for law firms does come with limitations and pitfalls.
Join us for a deep dive into the technology and best practices behind ChatGPT for lawyers. We explore its potential uses and limitations in the legal profession, as well as some sample prompts.
What is ChatGPT for Law Firms?
In simplest terms, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. It uses a natural language processing model to answer user questions in a conversational style.
The key to understanding ChatGPT for law firms is understanding the approach its creators took to make it.
Instead of just focusing on an exact prompt, ChatGPT looks to respond to the intent behind a user’s query. It determines this intent based on context, phrasing, and previous questions.
The result is paragraph-style answers designed to be more in-depth and specific than most prior AI tools for law firms.
This focus on intent and meaning also gives ChatGPT new and expanded interaction capabilities.
The software can correct itself when it makes a mistake and answer follow-up questions. It can even refuse to answer questions that it determines are impossible to answer reasonably.
The model is so extensive that ChatGPT can write many different types of copy, including:
- Social media posts
- Blog posts
- Website content
- Emails
- And more
Essentially, if a question is word-based, ChatGPT promises that it can provide a relevant output.
OpenAI and the Technology Behind ChatGPT
OpenAI is the nonprofit company that operates ChatGPT. Their revolutionary approach to AI is remarkably simple and centered on a new approach to one thing: data input.
Prior to ChatGPT, AI-powered solutions based their answers on relatively small databases of manually labeled data.
OpenAI changed the game; they gave their program access to a massive amount of open, untagged internet data.
They established a few ground rules for the program, and then they turned it loose to process and analyze all that data. ChatGPT developed its own set of parameters for understanding meaning and context in a piece of content.
You see, computers are extraordinarily good at identifying patterns on a massive scale across enormous data sets.
Because ChatGPT had access to such a wide range of data, it was able to establish more reliable methods for parsing text.
What Happens When You Ask ChatGPT a Question?
ChatGPT starts by breaking your prompt down into individual words and looking at its source data that uses those words. Based on those sources, it then tries to determine which words in your prompt are “most important.”
For instance, let’s say you put in the prompt “Give me a list of current legal statutes pertaining to brain injury cases in Florida”. ChatGPT might highlight “legal statutes”, “brain injury”, and “Florida” as the most relevant terms.
ChatGPT then uses those sources and key terms and creates sentences by continuously predicting the probable next word.
That’s how a simple prompt can result in an answer spanning multiple paragraphs and hundreds of words.
OpenAI trained ChatGPT on vast amounts of open internet data, including 175 billion parameters and 570 gigabytes of text. That number has since grown to 1.8 trillion parameters.
And that’s not all: every time someone interacts with it, the bot adds that data to its body of source material. This means that ChatGPT now has three years’ worth of learning under its belt in addition to the initial training input.
That learning curve is significant, considering ChatGPT broke 100 million users within two months of going live. The platform may now have as many as 1 billion.
Common Use Cases of ChatGPT for Lawyers
Legal professionals use ChatGPT in a variety of ways, including contract drafting and routine task automation.
1. Conduct Legal Research
Given that ChatGPT is a research aggregator, it comes as no shock that many lawyers use it to help them conduct legal research.
The AI-powered tool can create lists of relevant statutes, as well as provide brief summaries of previous case law.
But remember, you always need to double-check the legal data ChatGPT provides. In 2023, a team of lawyers had to pay a fine after some of the case citations they got from ChatGPT turned out to be fictional.
2. Summarize Long or Complex Legal Documents
In addition to finding cases, ChatGPT can reduce the time you have to spend on document and contract review.
It can review these documents in seconds and provide you with a succinct summary. Many AI companies for lawyers are already incorporating this functionality into their own software.
Just remember to follow best practices for ChatGPT for lawyers when using this functionality. Never include confidential client information in your prompt, and always review what it gives you.
3. Transcribe Recordings
Another great time-saving function ChatGPT offers is recording transcription.
Automatic transcription services can be inaccurate, and you may not have the time to listen to an entire recording. Skimming a deposition transcript, for instance, could give you enormous time savings.
ChatGPT can take an audio file and turn it into an accurate transcript in a few seconds. It can even highlight the key points of the transcript and the timestamps at which those happened so you can skip over the fluff.
4. Develop Case Strategies
One of the more interesting ways legal professionals use ChatGPT is as a tool to develop a strong case strategy. This usage combines the AI’s strength as a large-scale research tool with its unique natural language capabilities.
Start by giving ChatGPT a description of the case (remembering to scrub any confidential information). Then ask it to act as your opposing counsel and compile a list of legal strategies it will use against you.
You can also ask the AI assistant to list all possible case outcomes and advise you on how to prepare for them.
Although ChatGPT can’t predict exactly what tactics your opponents will use, this can give you a new insight on a case.
5. Draft Legal Documents
While it’s not a good idea to rely on ChatGPT completely to write long-form content, it can be a great way to get a first draft. This works especially well with formulaic law documents such as contracts.
ChatGPT can turn a list of contract requirements into a professionally worded draft in seconds. Then, you can review the draft carefully and correct any mistakes.
Many lawyers use ChatGPT to draft legal briefs, discovery questions, and direct examination questions, too.
6. Draft Client Communications
ChatGPT can make it easier for you to keep your clientele informed about their case status.
You can feed the tool a law document related to a case and ask it to summarize the document in plain language. From there, you can easily drop it into an email or communication portal.
You can also ask ChatGPT to draft emails asking clients to submit documents for their case, make a payment, and more.
7. Assist with Legal Marketing
If you struggle to write copy for your law firm marketing, ChatGPT can be a lifesaver.
Although the tool struggles with longer freeform content, it excels at shorter pieces. And the enormous body of example sources on social media make it easy for the AI tool to draft this content.
Ask ChatGPT to write captions for your social media posts, complete with hashtags and aligned with your brand tone. You can even prompt it to give you post ideas based on trending topics in the legal field or your particular specialty.
4 Limitations and Risks of ChatGPT for Law Firms
While ChatGPT can be a powerful addition to your legal practice processes, it isn’t a silver bullet. Like any tool, it comes with limitations, risks, and ethical considerations.
1. Inaccurate Content in a Highly Specific Field
While AI-powered technology is a powerful tool, it’s far from infallible.
Certain questions trip up AI’s formula, and ChatGPT is only as good as its sources. The open web contains a lot of inaccurate information, and generative AI sometimes pulls data from the wrong sources.
You cannot trust that what ChatGPT tells you is 100 percent accurate 100 percent of the time. And in the legal industry, that sort of margin of error is unacceptable.
If you’d like a demonstration of this fallibility, ask ChatGPT to compile some details about your alma mater. Then see if those details (like the mascot, year of founding, current president, etc.) align with reality.
These inaccuracies make sense when you remember the underlying mechanism behind ChatGPT. Its answers come from source content, but fact-checking is not a part of its programming.
In other words, this is not a tool that prioritizes accuracy. OpenAI has even said that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”
To say that inaccurate content in legal marketing is a concern is an understatement.
2. Poor Quality Content that Damages Credibility
In addition to its fact-checking gaps, legal AI tools inherently lack a human touch.
This may not seem like an issue at first glance. If you give it a prompt, all sentences may seem well-structured, and the words may be right for the industry.
But if you ask the platform to generate long-form content, you’ll see certain phrases begin to repeat. The writing never goes beyond the surface level.
The result is content that fails in a few crucial areas:
- It isn’t engaging to an audience likely looking for actionable advice.
- It doesn’t differentiate your website from any other legal content available online.
Again, a closer look at the AI-powered technology behind the tool explains why it produces spammy content.
Similar content from other legal services is exactly where ChatGPT draws its words from. Originality is not currently part of ChatGPT’s arsenal, although its quality has improved in the last three years.
Along with potential inaccuracies, spammy content is partly why OpenAI recommends against using ChatGPT for law firm content creation.
3. Potential Concerns with Copyright Infringement
ChatGPT also poses the potential for violating content copyrights.
Because ChatGPT draws from other published content, nothing it outputs is truly original. This becomes a problem when your legal practice uses uncredited material to promote its commercial interests.
To be clear, ChatGPT pulls from enough disparate content that it passes most (if not all) online plagiarism tests. But it can’t always pass the content checkers that look for signs of AI-generated material.
And that’s before we get to the complex legal issues of copyright infringement. The issue of who owns intellectual property that originated with ChatGPT is still murky.
Having the chatbot write website content for you could mean opening yourself up to potential jeopardy down the road.
4. Client Confidentiality Breaches
As you know, lawyers must meet extremely high standards for client confidentiality. ChatGPT poses a dangerous pitfall for lawyers aiming to stay in compliance with these regulations.
ChatGPT’s security measures don’t meet the ABA’s confidentiality requirements. Even turning off the platform’s data sharing settings doesn’t make it compliant with ABA standards.
If you put confidential client information into the chatbot, you could find yourself facing trouble with the ABA.
You can use ChatGPT to help with law matters, but always scrub or alter any confidential information. Be sure every member of your legal team follows appropriate confidentiality measures when using the tool.
How ChatGPT for Law Firms Can Affect SEO
ChatGPT has the potential to be an immensely useful tool for generating content on your website. However, it begins to fail when you rely on it for true content creation.
Google considers content created by AI-enabled chatbots as spam. In fact, the search engine giant has said publicly that it will devalue any AI content that it can find in its search rankings.
In other words, your search rankings will drop even for the most relevant keywords.
The reason for this clear stance is simple. Google’s priority is providing search results and a positive user experience to keep users coming back.
AI-generated content doesn’t meet those criteria as reliably as human-generated content does.
How to Write Effective ChatGPT Prompts for Lawyers
The golden rule of writing effective ChatGPT prompts is “Be specific.”
Remember, under all the AI technology pizzaz, ChatGPT is a research aggregator. It gathers information from around the internet and filters and repackages it based on your request.
The more specific you are about what you need, the better the results you’ll get. When writing ChatGPT prompts,
- Specify the role that you want ChatGPT to embody. For instance, tell it, “Act as my opposing counsel” if you’re developing a strategy for a case.
- Specify what format you need the output to be in. Do you need information in a paragraph, bullet list, table, or another format?
- Provide context. The more information you give ChatGPT about your case, the more specific your answer will be.
- Scrub confidential client information. Never enter confidential or identifying client information into ChatGPT. Always remove or anonymize confidential data.
- Break down more complicated requests into simple steps. Let’s say you want ChatGPT to help you edit a document for brevity, grammar, and completeness. Asking the tool to do each of these steps one at a time can produce better results.
- Ask follow-up questions. If you don’t get the information you need on the first try, ask ChatGPT for clarification. Providing more information in these follow-up questions can be helpful.
- Request sources for the data you receive. ChatGPT is far from infallible, and it’s always smart to check the information it gives you. Ask it what sources it pulled information from to make this process easier.
- Always edit the content ChatGPT generates. Never publish what you get from ChatGPT verbatim. You need to make sure that the information it gives you is accurate and appropriately phrased.
And remember, while ChatGPT is a great assistant in your legal work, it can never replace the human touch.
Sample ChatGPT Prompts for Lawyers
Now that we’ve covered the basics, what are some examples of good legal ChatGPT prompts? The prompts below can be helpful starting points if you’re feeling stuck on how to use AI for lawyers.
Please note that these ChatGPT prompts are examples only, and you should adjust them for your particular needs and regulations.
To Conduct Legal Research and Analysis
Give me an overview of legal research on [legal issue or topic]. Be concise and summarize the relevant case law, statutes, and regulations.
Provide analysis and conclusions based on this research, and give me a list of the sources you use.
To Find Precedents
Give me an overview of the legal precedents in [legal issue or topic]. Include a list of key cases in this area of law and the legal arguments in those cases.
Also identify any potential consequences for my law firm or client of misinterpreting these legal precedents.
To Interpret Legal Documents
Review this legal document and create a concise summary of its key points and implications. Highlight any complex or confusing language and give me a list of any citations included in the document.
Note: Do not use this prompt if the document you’re checking contains any confidential data.
To Confirm Proper Formatting
Review this [legal document type] for citation format and accuracy. Highlight any errors and suggest any necessary corrections.
To Prepare a Case
I’m preparing a case for the following legal dispute: [Describe the dispute, obscuring any confidential client information.] Create a list of all the possible outcomes of this dispute and tell me how best to prepare for them.
To Define Statutes and Regulations
What are the current statutes and regulations relating to [legal issue] in [jurisdiction]? Provide a list of citations and sources where I can research these statutes.
Note: Remember, ChatGPT’s information may not be completely up to date. This can be a helpful place to start, but always confirm that you have the latest information.
To Develop a Legal Strategy
Summarize legal arguments for and against the following issue: [describe the issue at hand, obscuring any confidential client information].
What are the potential risks and benefits of pursuing the following legal strategy [describe strategy]? Act as my opposing counsel and summarize the arguments you’re likely to use to counter this strategy.
To Draft Legal Briefs
Draft a legal brief arguing [detail your position] based on relevant case law and principles. Include an introduction, arguments, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. Ensure that the brief is clear and flows logically.
To Draft Discovery Questions
Give me a list of questions for opposing parties in discovery for [your particular legal issue]. Make sure the provided questions are clear and concise.
To Draft Direct Examination Questions
Create a list of direct examination questions for a witness expected to testify about [detail your specific legal matter]. These questions need to be clear and concise and need to encourage detailed responses.
Building a Better Legal Marketing Strategy with LawRank
ChatGPT has revolutionized the accessibility of generative AI for law firms. Although it’s far from perfect, ChatGPT for law firms can be a fantastic tool for streamlining work.
Always edit what you get from ChatGPT, and never input confidential data into the bot.
If you’re looking for more ways to take the hassle out of your work, LawRank is here to help.
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