Bad Advice for Lawyers Made Better

Issue 14

It’s easy to find bad advice on the internet. Do you have a favorite piece of bad advice? Here’s my current favorite for lawyers:

“Just pick an AI tool and experiment with it!”

To be fair, I can attribute some good intentions to this particular piece of bad advice. Lawyers have a reputation for being slow to warm up to new technology. I understand why some people are encouraging wary lawyers to give AI a chance rather than sitting this technological advancement out.

But it’s still really bad advice. Here’s why:

Your professional responsibilities require that you understand AI before you use AI. And for that reason, you should not use AI for legal purposes until you’ve developed your AI competency.

“Just pick an AI tool and experiment with it!” could be great advice for some professionals, but you’re not just any professional, you’re a lawyer who has professional responsibilities. Too many lawyers have already learned the hard way that it’s easy to fall short of your professional responsibilities while using AI if you start dabbling with it before you understand it.

Among other things, when you use AI for legal purposes, you have to be aware that AI models sometimes produce results that are inaccurate, inconsistent, and/or biased. You also have to be aware of the potential consequences of sharing confidential information with an AI model. I could go on with additional warnings, but it should already be abundantly clear that AI tools are not something to blindly experiment with in your work as a lawyer.  

Beyond the risks of falling short of your professional responsibilities, it’s simply not worth your time to dabble with an AI tool. Your time is too precious to waste aimlessly experimenting with a randomly selected AI tool. Your time would be better spent by:

• Strategically getting clear on how new technology could make the biggest impact in your organization;
• Finding technology solutions that align with your organization’s needs;
• Evaluating the risks associated with the options available to you; and
• Testing your options before selecting and implementing one or more tools.

After you’ve developed your AI competency, of course.  

If you’ve fallen victim to this piece of advice, please don’t feel bad. I’m sure your intentions were good, just like the intentions of whoever gave you the advice. That’s the tricky thing about AI: if you haven’t gotten up to speed on AI yet, you just don’t know what you don’t know.

So, here's the bad advice for lawyers made better:

Develop your AI competency before you experiment with an AI tool for law-related purposes. If you're going to pick an AI tool and experiment with it before you're up to speed on AI, make sure you're doing it in a low-stakes way that's unrelated to your legal work and won't risk your reputation or license to practice law.

If you haven’t done so yet, it’s time to develop your AI competency so that going forward you understand the pitfalls you'll want to avoid. And if you’ve already picked an AI tool and you’re not thrilled with it, it’s not too late to reevaluate your options. More on that topic soon.

Thanks for being here.

Jennifer
Good Journey Consulting

P.S. If you’re ready to get up to speed on AI, here are some ways I can help:

1. A Lawyer’s Practical Guide to AI: This guide is designed to help you develop your AI competency on issues that matter to lawyers, and also gives you actionable steps to help you explore whether you are ready to adopt AI in your practice, featuring a directory of over 150 AI tools developed for lawyers. You can get the guide here.  

2. Roadmap to AI Competency for Lawyers: If you’re just getting started with learning about AI, consider downloading this free resource, which explains six actionable steps you can take as you work on getting up to speed on AI. 

3. How Can Lawyers Use AI? This free resource lays out 40+ ways that lawyers can use AI with tools created for the legal industry.