Given the continuing reports about lawyers being referred for professional discipline or self-represented litigants being sanctioned for AI-generated court filings that include bogus content, today I took the most common (and free version) AI tools for a legal research and writing test. TL;DR: Do not use. Spare yourself the risk of sanctions and professional discipline….
Category: AI
Even self-represented litigants can be sanctioned for court filings that include AI-generated, bogus case law cites
A Missouri business owner opted to handle his own appeal following a November 2022 unpaid wages judgment ($311,313.70 with interest accruing 9% per year). For the research and writing part, the self-represented business owner hired an online consultant who claimed to be a California-licensed attorney. (See page 2 of the Reply brief for the explanation.)…
Putting Claude.ai to work creating outlines of filed court briefs
Given Anthropic’s Claude.ai’s impressive ability to handle .pdf uploads and complex prompts, it seemed only right to upload public efiled court briefing, put the AI-created output in comparative table form, and see how things would go. Overall? Pretty darn good! Check out how well (with a couple of misses) Claude followed my instructions on how to…
Putting Claude.ai to work drafting an opinion outline
Anthropic’s Claude.ai is the new [AI] kid on the block. Yes, I did link to one of “those” videos. One of Claude’s unique features is that users can upload file(s) (.pdf, .csv, .txt, and the like) and then ask questions about them. You can’t do this with the free versions of ChatGPT, Bard, or Bing…
Lawyers need to “up” their pleading game when describing generative AI exchanges
A Gwinnett County, Georgia court will handle what’s thought to be the first defamation lawsuit about a ChatGPT response (h/t Bloomberg Law and Professor Eugene Volokh). The June 5, 2023 complaint is thin on important details about the non-party user’s ChatGPT exchanges (or any damages suffered by the named plaintiff who has a fairly common…
ChatGPT users can “export” their chat history with a few clicks. Here’s how.
An affidavit exhibit in one of the Mata v. Avianca filings included a ChatGPT chat history. ChatGPT made an “export” feature available on April 11, 2023. Here is a step-by-step of how you can export your ChatGPT history (if, for example, you want to preserve and later share a conversation with others). This is a…
ChatGPT was never designed for legal research (and here is why it should NOT be used that way)
Even though ChatGPT has some pretty clear disclaimers about factual accuracy, two New York City attorneys and their law firm gained a lot of public attention for claiming that the bogus cases cited in their federal court filing were the result of (wrongly) using ChatGPT as a legal-research database. Federal District Court Judge P. Kevin…
Plain-language editing and other AI prompts (ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing) that work for me
A downloadable and printable handout is sometimes more useful than a text-based blog post. (At least for this “prompt engineer”.) Sharing what works for me, here is a downloadable three-page guide of the plain-language editing prompts that are helpful when I use ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing. Don’t be shy in sharing your experience and suggestions….
Here is how ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing measure sentiment, emotion, and tone
#AppellateTwitter wasted no time criticizing an experienced SCOTUS advocate for his recent brief’s word choice: But wait. Nearly one year (!) after the Court invited her views, the Solicitor General has delivered what can only be described as a hot mess of a brief. In it, the government claims to have unearthed a new obstacle…