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…
Tag: Lori Shemka
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…
Make Microsoft Word “macros” your power hack for plain-language editing
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…
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…
When judges add descriptive footnotes (and an itemized appendix) as they “write” about “inserted images,” they preserve the judicial-decision tapestry.
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…
Using ChatGPT for interpreting text message emojis, slang, and abbreviations
Footnotes 7–13 in a recent Intermediate Court of Appeals of Hawaii unpublished opinion defined quoted text message emojis, slang, and abbreviations: 7 The text messages are quoted verbatim with footnotes throughout to clarify terms, abbreviations, and symbols used, as may be necessary. 8 “Sup” is an “informal greeting equivalent to ‘What’s up?’” Sup, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sup…
I’ll pass on asking ChatGPT to reliably “summarize” court opinions
The Michigan Court of Appeals recently issued an interesting published opinion about two siblings charged with truancy, their right to counsel, and whether they waived that right in the trial court. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Elizabeth Gleicher wrote the lead opinion. She also penned a separate concurring opinion. Judge Thomas Cameron also wrote a…