Litigation
Cal. Litig. MAY 2024, VOLUME 37, ISSUE 1
Content
- 2023 Year-end Report On the Federal Judiciary
- A Day Without a Court Reporter
- Editor's Foreword: No Waiting: Litigaition Is Here!
- Editor's Foreword: No Waiting: Litigation Is Here!
- From the Section Chair Our 2024 Hall of Fame Inductions, Including Our Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame 30Th Anniversary Reception and Event
- Interview With United States District Judge Troy L. Nunley
- Navigating the New Legal Landscape For Child Sexual Abuse Civil Litigation In State and Federal Court
- PAST SECTION CHAIRS & EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
- Reporting Another Lawyer's Professional Misconduct: Implications For California Lawyers
- SECTION OFFICERS & EDITORIAL BOARD
- Table of Contents
- What Will Artificial Intelligence Mean For Litigation?
- Whither Chevron? the Past, Present, and Possible Futures of Judicial Deference
- Why Black Box Ai Evidence Should Not Be Allowed In Criminal Cases
- Working: Conversations With Essential Workers Behind the Scenes In the Court System
- Ai - Use With Caution
AI – USE WITH CAUTION
Written by Reza Torkzadeh & Allen P. Wilkinson*
In November 2022, the practice of law underwent a fundamental transition with the release by OpenAI of its chatbot ChatGPT. Everywhere you look today, you are bombarded with a plethora of articles about and advertisements for ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLM) boasting about all they can do for you and your practice. It is touted, as the old saying goes, as the greatest thing since sliced bread. ChatGPT-4 can pass the Bar exam, as well as the Multistate Professional Responsibility exam. It can make poor and mediocre law students better legal writers, but paradoxically can bring down the quality of better student legal writers.
With AI, the legal profession is currently undergoing its most substantial and significant metamorphosis since the first lawyers hung out their shingles hundreds of years ago. Back then, there were vastly fewer laws, and it was quite easy for early lawyers to call themselves general practitioners: a lawyer could prepare wills, draft contracts, handle divorces, negotiate business deals, prepare real estate contracts and handle the closings of such transactions, and represent persons charged with a crime, everything from barroom brawls to cattle rustling to cold-blooded murder. Today, it is hard enough for a lawyer to stay competent and up to date in any one specific area of law.
Until fairly recently, lawyers spent untold hours researching the "big books" to discover legal authority — e.g., case law, statutes, regulations, and the like — for their position as well as authority that went against their position. Then, they had to Shepardize the cases and statutes to see if they had been followed, modified, distinguished, or overturned. After hours of research, they then had to put pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — and craft a solid, well thought out, and organized brief using their finest analytical skills, deductive reasoning, and persuasive arguments, the seeds of which had been implanted in them in law school.