Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
The New Question for Trial Lawyers
to ask a lawyer. Someone unfamiliar with litigation can ask what a deposition is before attending one. A client can use AI to help organize a massive collection of documents or translate complicated terminology into plain English. For many consumers, AI may be the first tool that makes the legal system feel remotely understandable, and, important, more accessible. That matters. Plaintiffs’ lawyers should be particularly sensitive to access to justice. Our clients are often individuals facing institutions with vastly greater resources. Employers, insurance companies, manufacturers, and corporations have lawyers. Giving consumers better access to information is not inherently the enemy. AI may democratize access to legal information without eliminating the need for someone who understands lawyering.
AI is not going away. The clients five years from now will most likely have even more access to legal information than any generation of clients before them. Better informed consumers can identify legal problems earlier, preserve evidence, understand their rights, and ask better questions. AI may ultimately connect people with attorneys who otherwise would never have realized they had a viable claim. That is an extraordinary opportunity for consumer law, but information without context can also create false certainty. Our job has never simply been to know what the law says. It is to understand which facts matter, which witnesses will be believed, which evidence will survive scrutiny, which arguments will persuade twelve strangers, when a theoretically strong claim is practically weak, or a seemingly modest case is actually extraordinary. AI can read thousands of cases. It cannot sit across from a client and notice that she hesitates before answering one particular question. It cannot watch a witness testify and realize the jury has stopped believing him. It cannot fully appreciate why one email changes the entire theory of a case. And it cannot look a client in the eye before mediation and explain why accepting less than she hoped for may still be the right decision (at least, not yet). Perhaps the most useful response when a client announces, “ChatGPT says I have a great case,” is neither annoyance nor dismissal, it is curiosity. “Interesting. What did you tell it?” The answer may tell us something important not just about artificial intelligence, but about our client, her expectations, her evidence, and the story she believes she is bringing to court. And in the age of AI, understanding that story may be more important than ever.
Lawyers Are Not Exempt From AI Overreliance
There is an uncomfortable irony in warning clients against overreliance on AI while lawyers enthusiastically adopt the same technology. AI can make our practices better, helping attorneys organize information, brainstorm arguments, summarize large amounts of material, improve drafts, and reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks. Our ethical obligations do not disappear because the technology is impressive. California’s State Bar guidance emphasizes duties including confidentiality, competence, diligence, supervision, candor, and the need to critically review AI generated output. AI can assist judgment, it cannot replace responsibility for judgment.
For lawyers, that responsibility is professional; for clients, the consequences can be personal.
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM September/October 2026
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