Chat­GPT will be a key part of future of low-​income legal infor­ma­tion for con­sumers, if it can be done well

The abil­ity of chat­GPT to pass a law school exam illus­trates that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can, indeed, be taught to “think like a lawyer” and spot rel­e­vant issues like a lawyer.

While there are many legit­i­mate fears about the mis­use of things like chat GPT; on the upside, if one can fil­ter out mis­in­for­ma­tion, the poten­tial to deliver qual­ity tai­lored legal infor­ma­tion and rel­e­vant issues start­ing to low-​income con­sumers is immense.

I remem­ber when I entered the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan law school in 1981, they promised that they would teach me to “think like a lawyer.”

At the time, at age 21, just fin­ish­ing a degree in polit­i­cal sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy and study­ing Hobbes and Burke and fas­ci­nated with the power and the nature of rules and law, I was more of a gestalt thinker and liked study­ing polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and the larger ques­tions of col­lec­tive human behavior.

I was not pre­pared to think like a lawyer.

I had to really be taught to think in the reduc­tion­ist, slice-​and-​dice,  legal­is­tic that lawyers are paid to think.

I can do it, like a par­lor trick almost. I got pretty good at it. I did it well enough to make Michi­gan Law Review and go on to clerk for a Chief Jus­tice of the State Supreme Court of Cal­i­for­nia after law school…

But I also know it’s a trained way of think­ing. A method of ana­lyz­ing issues and lump­ing them or split­ting them depend­ing on the out­come you want. Hope­fully, the out­come you want is justice.

But when you’re a lawyer, you’re paid to get the most for your client, whether it’s fair or not. For exam­ple, Don­ald Trump uses lawyers like this as a weapon.

Lawyers get very good at this. And there’s no rea­son that AI can’t get as good or better.

While there are plenty of sin­is­ter pos­si­bil­i­ties for this new capa­bil­ity, there are also plenty of worth­while and needed uses for this same capability;

Imag­ine for the first time that con­sumers of all incomes will be able to get qual­ity well, writ­ten legal infor­ma­tion tai­lored specif­i­cally to their sit­u­a­tion at lit­tle or no cost. This can only help con­sumers become savvier and legally edu­cated, pro­vided they are not bom­barded with a cloud of misinformation.

I hope Legal​Con​sumer​.com can con­tinue as a needed bea­con of accu­rate infor­ma­tion and what may soon be a sea of sharks. I look for­ward to the cre­ative chal­lenge of using these new tools to deliver law to every­one in a way they can eas­ily digest and make use of in their daily lives.

Chat­GPT could rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way ordi­nary Amer­i­cans have their legal needs met.

Already a traf­fic ticket is going to be fought by a robot lawyer some­time next month.

We are only at the begin­ning of this.

Legal Ser­vices has tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ences that dis­cuss how it can be used to keep peo­ple from being evicted, quickly steer­ing them to rel­e­vant local resources.

Lawyers are dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of how this is going to change the prac­tice of law.

 

There is no telling where we will be two years from now.