What is the Role of AI in the Legal Field?

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The legal field is one of many pondering the use and application of ChatGPT in the future. Law is one of several professions that appears to be on the cusp of being transformed by ChatGPT, which takes a whole lot less billable hours to whip up documents, but the chatbot isn’t prepared to have its day in court just yet. To prove we still need lot of human oversight, read on.

A New York attorney employed AI to do the heavy lifting after filing a brief containing multiple references to nonexistent cases. Steven Schwartz of Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, has practiced for more than 30 years but thought he would cut some corners with the new ChatGPT. He represents a client suing an airline over injuries he claims he got when a serving cart bumped into him mid-flight. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill case, except that Schwartz submitted a brief to the court that included references to what the federal judge hearing the suit called six “bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citation” to support his position. Turns out, Schwartz relied on ChatGPT for his legal research, and it simply made those cases up—and insisted they were real and available in major legal databases when he asked the bot for a source.

It’s important to note that ChatGPT, like all AI chatbots, is a language model trained to follow instructions and provide a user with a response to their prompt. That means, if a user asks ChatGPT for information, it could give that user exactly what they’re looking for, even if it’s not factual. New report on ChatGPT & generative AI in law firms shows opportunities abound, even as concerns persist – Thomson Reuters Institute