Starting January 1, 2024, indigent individuals will no longer have to pay the cost for any ordered newspaper publication in Michigan name change matters. Thanks to today’s amendment of MCR 3.613 by the Michigan Supreme Court, the local court will have to pay any newspaper publication cost if the court has otherwise waived fees under…
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…
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…
Why it matters Readers know why they prefer writers who use short, simple, and familiar words and phrases: before > antecedent to | so > accordingly | matches > comports with. Unnecessary words should be struck (like pulling weeds from your garden and flower beds): enough > a sufficient number of | [omit] > as…
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…
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…
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…
Why? Because many third-party-online publishers leave images out from the original decision. Imagine footnotes like these being dropped into a judicial decision: [Proposed new footnote:] To help future readers who may read this decision in a third-party, text-only format that left out the image, Figure 1 is a black-and-white portrait photograph of Prince taken in…
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….
#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…