Dallas Employment Trial Lawyer Austin Campbell
Summary: AI is an amazing tool, but its use in the legal field is limited. This article cautions against people—lawyers or non-lawyers—becoming reliant on AI that fundamentally is not intelligent or able to meet the ethical standards of giving legal advice.
To say “Artificial Intelligence” is one of the hottest topics in today’s society is probably an understatement. From Google now putting AI-generated results first for most internet searches, to the creation of AI “assistants” to help write emails, to media companies having AI draft press releases or even full news articles, you probably see AI-generated language every single week.
There’s quite a mystique around the concept, but modern AI is most definitely not like in the movies. “Generative” AI is not intelligent at all—it is basically just a computer algorithm (or several algorithms) capable of sorting through large amounts of text or images relevant to a user’s prompt to create a response based on the data it has access to. In other words, you can ask it for something, and it searches the internet or some database to put together a response. The fact that it is using information put together by humans makes it able to write responses that appear to be written by a human as well.
This can be useful for many things. AI can answer technical questions (especially on more black and white topics like math) or summarize large amounts of information efficiently. It can save people time creating a write-up of something where the accuracy of the information in it is “low stakes.”
But AI falters when it comes to more complex or “gray” subjects. American law is one such gray area. There are legal answers that are right or wrong, of course, but they depend on many complicated and interconnected factors. We’ve had situations where clients or potential clients come to us having “researched” a topic using AI, only for what they got to be wrong or just plain nonsensical.
To give advice, a lawyer often has to be able to interpret text written by other humans (statutes, cases, regulations, etc., that are sometimes decades old) and apply them to a client’s specific situation. A lawyer also has to be able to prioritize information, since many legal rules may have contradictions or may even no longer be “good” law (that is, something the courts actually apply). And lawyers have to sometimes get creative if a situation is something truly unprecedented. For instance, answering a legal question on something as straightforward as how long you have to file a lawsuit can be simple, but can also affected by things such as what the lawsuit is for, what state you live in, what state you’d be filing it in, what court you’d be filing it in, who you’re suing, and so on. All of these things can impact the legal standard (either practically or literally) that you have to follow.
But fundamentally, modern generative AI doesn’t actually understand what it is “reading.” It cannot actually do the same thing a lawyer does. There are also “soft” factors that impact legal advice all the time. For instance, in Texas, the ethical rules of lawyers have this to say:
2. Advice couched in narrow legal terms may be of little value to a client, especially where practical considerations, such as costs or effects on other people, are predominant. Purely technical legal advice, therefore, can sometimes be inadequate. It is proper for a lawyer to refer to relevant moral and ethical considerations in giving advice. Although a lawyer is not a moral advisor as such, moral and ethical considerations impinge upon most legal questions and may decisively influence how the law will be applied.
3. A client may expressly or impliedly ask the lawyer for purely technical advice. When such a request is made by a client experienced in legal matters, the lawyer may accept it at face value. When such a request is made by a client inexperienced in legal matters, however, the lawyer’s responsibility as advisor may include indicating that more may be involved than strictly legal considerations.
Tex. Disc. R. Prof’l Conduct 2.01 (comments 2-3).
And fundamentally, AI does not understand legal ethics. It does not even “understand” the concept of truth. If you ask it for an answer you want, it will give you that answer regardless of how accurate that is. AI has even been known to “hallucinate” facts or laws that simply do not exist. For that reason various courts, including here in Dallas, have explicitly prohibited the use of AI by lawyers. Lawyers in other parts of the country have gotten into a whole lot of trouble by being too reliant on AI research.
As things stand now, AI cannot give you real legal advice. If you believe your employer may be doing something illegal, you should talk to an employment attorney like those at Rob Wiley, P.C.