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

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

January 26, 2023 by Albin Renauer

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.

Filed Under: Lawyers, Legal Technology, Updates Tagged With: A2J

About Albin Renauer

Albin Renauer is the founder of Legal Consumer, which he began in 2006 as an online companion to his book, How to File for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. Albin received his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1985. He worked for various public-interest law firms in the Bay Area and also as a staff attorney for Chief Justice Rose Bird of the California Supreme Court. He also spent 17 years as an editor at Nolo, where he helped create numerous books and software programs, including the bestselling WillMaker. He edited Law on the Net, the first online directory of legal resources and was the architect of Nolo's Webby Award winning website during the dot-com boom.

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