How will it make your client feel?

In case you missed it over on LinkedIn on Monday, I was pleased to welcome Gavel to The AI Access to Justice Initiative. You can read more about Gavel's pledge here.

Issue 9 

While I was doing the work to get up to speed on AI, one of things that surprised me the most was how many different ways lawyers can use AI with tools made for the legal industry. If you are a lawyer who wants to explore using AI, depending on your practice, you may have a lot of choices. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a specific subset of those use cases: client-facing AI tools.  

If you choose to consider AI tools that your clients or prospective clients would interact with, one great strategy to help guide your decision-making is to pay attention to your own AI interactions as a customer. Have you experienced any notable AI interactions as a customer yet? Here’s an experience I had recently. As I was getting ready to launch A Lawyer’s Practical Guide to AI, I had an issue where I needed to customize something that was automated by my website provider. I contacted customer support and I received an email response in less than a minute from a sender that identified itself as an AI bot. I was surprised to receive a substantive response so quickly, and curious to assess the quality of the response. The response was detailed, confident, and unfortunately…completely inaccurate. It was frustrating to follow the detailed steps provided in the response only to eventually realize that the advice was nowhere near on point or helpful. If the AI bot had given me accurate information, I would have been impressed and delighted to get a response that solved my problem in under a minute. But that’s not what happened here. Ultimately it was so much more off putting to get bad advice from an AI bot than it would have been to get an automated response letting me know when I could expect to be contacted by a human. 

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the stakes were very low in this unimpressive interaction with an AI bot. But there are certainly higher stakes examples. For instance, Air Canada was held responsible when its customer service chatbot promised a discount that was not available to a passenger.[i] And even worse, New York City’s MyCity chatbot gave business owners inaccurate advice that would have entailed breaking the law.[ii] It’s easy to envision how unimpressive interactions with an inaccurate or unreliable AI tool could quickly damage your relationship with a client or prospective client, not to mention fall short of your professional responsibilities.  

In addition to carefully evaluating your professional responsibilities in relation to any client-facing AI tool you consider adopting, it's important to think about how interacting with the tool will make your clients feel. If you pay attention to your interactions with AI and how they make you feel, you’ll be better positioned to make informed and confident decisions about client-facing AI solutions for your practice. There may be client-facing AI solutions available to you with the potential to surprise and delight your clients and prospective clients. Other solutions probably won’t, and it’s important to be able to tell the difference while evaluating new technology options, and before you implement new technology in your practice that could interact with your client and prospective clients without your direct involvement.

In your quest for efficiency, it’s important to be careful not to sacrifice human connection points when they matter. In this increasingly online world, one of the ways you can set yourself apart as a lawyer is by the way you choose to interact with your clients. Trust is such an essential element of the lawyer-client relationship, and it’s just not worth risking in the name of efficiency.  

Which tasks in your practice can be entrusted to technology and which ones need a human touch? Choose carefully. 

Thanks for being here. 

Jennifer
Good Journey Consulting 

P.S. We are in the last few weeks of introductory pricing for A Lawyer's Practical Guide to AI. If you've been thinking about purchasing the guide, be sure to do so before the end of the year, as the price will increase to $499 in 2025. 

[i] Maria Yagoda, Airline held liable for its chatbot giving passenger bad advice - what this means for travellers, BBC, (Feb. 23, 2024),  https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know. 

[ii] Jonathan Allen, New York City defends AI chatbot that advised entrepreneurs to break laws, Reuters, (Apr. 4, 2024 18:14 PDT),  https://www.reuters.com/technology/new-york-city-defends-ai-chatbot-that-advised-entrepreneurs-break-laws-2024-04-04/.