A divided Michigan Supreme Court released its 32-page decision in People v Samuels (164050) on Friday. I deleted the Syllabus pages and put Claude.ai (a next-generation AI assistant) to work on the majority and dissenting opinions. First, I asked Claudi.ai to outline the decision using this complex prompt: Draft an opinion outline of the attached…
Tag: Lori Shemka
The case for adding the new Black’s Law Dictionary (12th Edition) to your legal-writing toolbox
The 12th Edition of Black’s Law Dictionary was released early last month. Chief Editor Bryan A. Garner and publisher Thomson Reuters highlight that 2,500 new terms have been added to the more than 70,000 law-related words and phrases. Thousands of Latin maxims also make their debut. Plus, every page has been supplemented and revised. Price:…
Prompting Claude.ai and ChatGPT to outline a new Michigan Supreme Court decision
Today, the Michigan Supreme Court issued a split opinion in People v Prude (Docket 165664)—a case that was decided without oral argument. Because users can now attach files with their “prompts” when using the free versions of the generative AI tools Claude.ai and ChatGPT, I decided to take each for a spin to outline the…
Justice Barrett’s dissent-framing style
Justice Barrett’s recent dissent in Fischer v. United States captures her statutory-analysis approach. Her conversational writing style—one that can be easily understood by the lay public—may be thought of as common sense. It’s also fair to assume that Justice Kagan contributed to some of its tone since she (and Justice Sotomayor) joined it. Justice Barrett’s…
Informational brackets can be used to describe text or social media exchanges
The Court of Appeals in Ohio recently issued an opinion that nicely describes message exchanges that happened on Facebook Messenger—and the court did it without copying and pasting images. Instead, the opinion uses informational brackets as highlighted below from an excerpt. The risk of using uncaptioned images in opinions is that the images are often…
Protective orders that prohibit submitting confidential discovery material to open generative AI tools
In a sign of the AI times, the federal court in the Southern District of New York recently entered a protective order that includes an AI-restriction paragraph:
Corrections happen
The Michigan Supreme Court decided Marion v Grand Trunk Western Railroad Company (Docket No. 164298) on June 5, 2024. The .pdf that was first released was created at 2:29 p.m. Just like with lawyers and paralegals, sometimes an oversight is recognized after the file is submitted. And that happened here. An updated .pdf file was…
T-minus 74 days. Many important MSC decisions are on the way.
Appellate geeks often track which justice authored which decision during a sitting. SCOTUSblog posts one form of that data here. As a court’s term gets closer to its end, legal pundits speculate about who could be writing the undecided cases. We will hear and see more of this as the Supreme Court of the United…
Asking Claude.ai to outline a court decision
Last August, I shared my experience using Claude.ai to outline case briefs (pretty good!). Today, I took the current (free) version of Claude.ai for a spin to outline a recent unanimous Michigan Supreme Court opinion. tl;dr: Claude.ai did a really good job. My only quibble is that it left out the role of one of…
How judges can draft and add easy-to-understand summaries in their written decisions
Summary for Pro Se Plaintiff The magistrate judge is recommending that the motion for summary judgment be granted. Your evidence does not show that Nurse Yule, Nurse Practitioner Housley, or Dr. Wong acted in ways that they knew were likely to cause you additional harm or suffering. Such evidence is required to show a violation…