11th Nov 2024
Horror stories of AI making things up, writing bad prose and creating compliance nightmares are so 2023. If you’re not now using AI every day in your job as an in-house lawyer, you’re not doing your job as efficiently (or perhaps even as well) as you should be. Here are six ways I’ve seen in-house lawyers incorporate AI into their workflows.
Taking good notes is one of the most boring parts of being a professional. It’s also one of the most stressful (and boring).
What if you miss something vital? What if you misrepresent what someone says? What if people question your version of events.
The good news is that these are no longer issues at all. Video software like Zoom and Teams has a transcript function built in (and it keeps getting better). But don’t stop at the transcript. Feed it into a large language model – like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini – and ask it to generate a summary based on what was said. Quiz it on what decisions were made, what action items emerged and any details you might have forgotten.
There was a time when creativity was hard to come by. Not anymore.
Need some good topics for an article? Different ways to structure an email or even a deal? Some alternative approaches to compliance or insights into legal risks you hadn’t thought of?
AI can help.
ChatGPT and other large language models will give you tens, hundreds, thousands of ideas in seconds.
Now, I know, not all of those ideas will be good ones. Many will be downright lousy. But that’s how idea generation works. You’re lucky if one in ten has legs, and you never get to the perfect idea without refining it first.
To get AI for you, ask for an angle (or five), a contrarian view, something outlandish, or ideas that no one has thought about before. Then work with it to refine them and fit what you do.
With a bit of input from your end, you’re likely to explore directions you never would have otherwise.
AI has a well-documented history of inventing its own facts. (OpenAI freely admits that ChatGPT lies.) But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in your research.
I say this for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of the news-making examples of AI getting lazy people into trouble (like the lawyer who presented its made-up cases in court) involved earlier and less developed iterations of the LLM. The latest versions, like ChatGPT-4o (or the beta of o1) will search the internet and provide citations that you can check out for yourself. So too will Google Gemini.
AI can help you find, confirm or dispute sources you find, and it can tell you if the information you already have is any good, or whether there are gaps in your work. It will also tell you whether you’ve forgotten something or there’s another point of view that you should include (and what it is).
Most of what you do will be based on reading. But how often do you read through an entire document only to find it probably wasn’t worth the time.
AI can cut down your wasted time enormously by summarising documents and pinpointing information for you. If you’re looking for a particular piece of information, feed the whole document into AI and ask where it talks about “X” and what it says.
If you’re feeling bold, ask what’s interesting about the document and why.
You can also give it two documents – even contracts – to compare, then get it to highlight the similarities and differences between their arguments and which is better, more convincing or more likely to hold up.
If there’s one thing AI really excels at, it’s churning out words.
When you’re next stuck halfway through a sentence, ask ChatGPT to finish it for you. Better yet, ask it to finish it in three or five different ways. Ask it to write it in different styles, use different words, come to different conclusions, or emphasise different points.
Ask it to write in different styles. Give a style guide and ask it to follow it. Give it your work (upload some emails or articles you’ve written and ask it to copy them).
All of the large language models write much better than they once did. And if you don’t like what they give you, don’t worry. Often, it’s by seeing what we don’t like that we discover what we do. So tell it what’s working and what’s not and get it to churn out yet another draft.
The writing and editing processes are inseparable. Good writing is good editing, and the best weapon when it comes to editing is always another set of eyes. Unfortunately, that’s not something all writers have had access to – at least not until now. Because now, we have ChatGPT.
Ask ChatGPT to go over what you write and make sure the terminology is consistent.
Alternatively, ask it to analyse your writing’s strengths and weaknesses, whether you’ve left something out, whether there’s data you should have included, whether there’s a counter-argument you haven’t addressed, or whether you should break your information up with a list or box or some other device.
Get it to read your writing, suggest better or more watertight ways of expressing things or how to better connect with your clients.
And because there’s nothing that makes us writers look more unprofessional than typos, ask it to find and correct them before you press send.
Better than using one large language model, why not have two or three on the go? Play them off against each other. Ask them both to do the same thing, or to refine other’s work.
Ask them both to interpret the meaning of a clause, and then to argue each other’s point of view. Ask them to both write an email and see which one works, or both to read the same document and see who decides what is more important.
In short, it’s by playing around with AI in every stage of what you do, that you’ll see how it can revolutionise the way you work, helping you deliver a better product more quickly.
Ralph has taught thousands of professionals in Australia and overseas how to incorporate AI into their work to become faster and better writers.
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