NEWS
Like any prediction system, AI has blind spots. It can overfit, clinging too tightly to patterns it has seen before, or underfit, missing nuance. That’s why outputs can look convincing but still be wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of the prompt determines the quality of the result. Sometimes prompting feels like shaking a Magic 8 Ball. As a kid, I thought I could trick mine into giving me the answer I wanted. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t. AI can feel the same. You can chase the perfect prompt and hit a dead end. But over time, you build intuition. The more you use it, even for small, low-stakes tasks, the better you get at driving it safely from point A to point B. On security and confidentiality, I see the same concerns many do. But the rules aren’t fundamentally different from cloud computing. The platforms we use don’t train their models on client data, and the information is secured to the same standard already applied to sensitive legal work. The bigger risk is us. Lawyers are busy. Deadlines loom. The temptation to take outputs at face value without checking them is real. But the safeguard is the same as it always was: verify the source information for everything. LOOKING FORWARD That is how I’ve come to see AI in my practice. It doesn’t replace the buckets of competency I’ve spent ten years developing. It augments them. It multiplies my capacity but doesn’t change the underlying obligation to exercise judgment, know the file, and stay rooted in the evidence. This technology has made me more of the lawyer I wanted to be: spending more time on judgment, strategy, and advocacy, and less on the grind of moving a mountain of documents six minutes at a time.
That framework has changed. AI compresses the first stage dramatically. It can pull facts from evidence and correspondence, organize them coherently, and provide references in a fraction of the time. The second stage has sped up too. I can query the file, check for inconsistencies, and generate alternative framings in minutes. AI hasn’t replaced my judgment. It multiplies my capacity to exercise it. The result: more time on the part of my work that matters most - analyzing, advising, advocating. It has also changed the rhythm of drafting. Like most lawyers, I’ve agonized over phrasing, spending hours trying to distill complex points into a single sentence. Now, once I know the components, I can generate variations instantly. The focus has shifted from how do I say this? to what do I need to say? Day to day, the way I use AI looks mundane, but it matters:
Summarize an affidavit with para references Extract dates and build a timeline Compare two clauses and flag differences List key issues from correspondence Check a draft against the file for accuracy Research & Analysis
Drafting & Communication
Rewrite a section concisely Turn rough notes into a client-ready email Draft a first-pass notice of motion Reorganize arguments into a factum outline Generate a neutral case summary for reporting
These are the building blocks of practice: identifying, synthesizing, packaging information. They also strain a lawyer’s capacity. Having a tool to accelerate them, while still leaving me responsible for verification, has fundamentally changed how I work. UNDERSTANDING THE RISKS Adopting new technology isn’t without risk. Overreliance on AI has already been well publicized. Long before I used it in practice, I was reading about algorithmic systems. In The Master Algorithm , the author draws a simple analogy: you don’t need to know how to build an engine to drive a car, but you do need to understand the steering wheel, accelerator, and brakes. AI is the same. At their core, these tools are advanced prediction machines. Trained on vast amounts of text, they generate language by predicting the next word. They use neural networks - layers of algorithms that recognize patterns - and a mechanism called “attention,” which lets the model weigh which parts of a prompt are most relevant. That’s why the way you frame a question matters so much. The attention mechanism is the steering wheel.
2 ROBINS APPLEBY LLP | LEGAL PULSE FALL / WINTER 2025
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