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At Norling Law, as with many other law firms across the globe, we have seen an increasing number of clients relying on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, amongst various others, to either attempt to undertake some legal work to try keep their legal fees down, and/or to provide their lawyers with instructions.
External AI tools bring many benefits when used in the correct context. At Norling Law we also use AI for law firms, which have confidential legal data protection procedures built in. However, legal professionals are discovering that clients’ growing reliance on AI is creating new and serious challenges.
Problems include confidentiality risks, people inadvertently harming their own positions rather than seeking legal advice, and the reliance on misinformation from chatbots. Additionally, clients sometimes use generative AI tools to communicate their instructions to their lawyers, which can lead to confusion, ambiguity and an increase in legal fees.
Like doctors, lawyers have long dealt with clients who do their own internet research, which leads to misconceptions needing to be corrected. Generative AI guidance has amplified this issue. AI tools often provide answers that sound very confident and authoritative, even when they are incorrect, outdated, or not relevant to New Zealand law.
We are seeing more clients relying on AI legal advice or documents, including sometimes with references to laws or cases that do not actually apply to the client’s case. In some instances, there are references to laws from other countries, or even fictional data, such as cases and statutes that do not exist.
While we encourage clients to take an active role in their legal cases, recently, lawyers are being tasked with repeatedly correcting the misconceptions given by chatbots to clients, which consumes valuable time at the client’s cost and can damage trust between the lawyer and the client.
Human lawyers spend years studying, training, and gaining experience in the legal profession to understand not just what the law says, but how it applies to the particular facts of a particular case. AI-powered tools, on the other hand, often miss the subtle but crucial details that can make all the difference. Further, they often rely on wrong or non-existent laws. While this may change in the future with Generative AI capabilities becoming more advanced, we are not there yet, and it is likely that it will take years until we get there.
When clients rely on AI-generated legal research, lawyers often need to spend extra time reviewing and explaining why certain “legal arguments” or references do not apply to the case at hand. This can increase clients’ legal costs and sometimes cause unnecessary worry or confusion. It can also make it more difficult for lawyers to focus on building the strongest possible case for their client, as they need to address conflicting or irrelevant arguments suggested by AI systems.
Just as doctors tailor their advice and treatment plans based on medical history and specific test results, lawyers tailor their legal advice and strategies based on the unique facts of each client’s situation.
That is why at Norling Law, we often ask clients to provide a detailed timeline of events in their own words.
Unfortunately, we have recently noticed some clients using AI to generate these timelines, but these are often too generic and miss important details we need to protect client interests.
Some clients are not just using AI for legal advice. Many clients now also use AI tools to draft contracts, pleadings, demand letters, and/or emails with the other party before seeking legal review.
In some cases, the client has already tried to deal with the matter themselves using “AI lawyer” tools, which has inadvertently resulted in a compromise on their position.
By the time they come to human legal professionals, it makes the legal options available to them much narrower.
While AI-generated “legal” documents and correspondence may look polished, they frequently produce false outputs that contain critical legal errors or fail to include important information or clauses.
Many clients hand such documents to their lawyers just to “check” in the hope of cost savings. To the contrary, the cost of document review, fixing, and redrafting more often than not exceeds what it would have cost the client had the lawyer drafted the document from scratch.
Additionally, when clients use gen AI tools to seek legal advice or draft documents, they often input sensitive facts, financial details, or even litigation strategies into public AI tools without realising that those platforms may retain or use their input data.
This can inadvertently waive lawyer-client privilege or expose client details to third parties. In other words, inserting confidential data into an AI provider’s platform may result in the opposing side or other third parties getting access to the client’s information.
On the other hand, lawyers have regulated professional obligations and must strictly adhere to lawyer-client privilege. Everything a client tells their lawyer is confidential, legally privileged material unless waived with client consent.
Further obligations of legal professionals include employing independent and objective critical reasoning towards clients’ cases, acting in their clients’ best interests, and, where a litigation matter is concerned, not to mislead the Court.
These obligations inform the legal strategies that lawyers advise their clients on. Moreover, lawyers face serious penalties if these obligations are breached. Chatbots do not have these professional responsibilities or the consequences that come with breaching them. Rather, AI outputs correspond with the user’s input, which is more often than not lacking independence and objectivity, leading to unhelpful outcomes.
A lawyer needs to carefully balance their obligations to competently advise clients, with their obligation to also follow their client’s instructions. Generative AI, on the other hand, only focuses on what it has been told to do rather than providing objective and independent reasoned advice having regard to specific details (some details of which clients may not even realise are important).
Recently, there has been a general decrease in clients valuing their lawyer’s advice, and an increase in clients providing “instructions” to their lawyers using Chatbots to generate emails to their lawyers.
In some extreme instances, clients are not fully aware of what instructions they are giving their lawyers, as they have relied on artificial intelligence to generate those instructions without human oversight. Oftentimes, Chatbots generate confusing “instructions” leading to lawyers needing to spend time deciphering and clarifying.
Overall, many clients intend (innocently) to use generative AI to reduce both time and costs spent on their legal matters. However, it appears that the opposite occurs when using AI in legal contexts – time and costs increase.
Generative AI can be an extremely helpful digital tool when used in the right context. At Norling Law, we appreciate that both legal fees and the time-consuming nature of dispute resolution can sometimes be difficult for clients to manage, especially on top of their own full-time careers or businesses.
Our legal team does use in-house gen AI tools that are specifically designed for use by lawyers and have mechanisms in place to protect lawyer-client confidentiality. We are trained to use these legal-specific AI technologies in a way that does not undermine our independence, objectivity, or due diligence.
However, when used incorrectly, the potential risks of AI in law and legal practice are confusion, erosion of trust, and an increase in costs.
Generative AI is reshaping client behaviour and the way legal firms interact with their clients in profound ways.
However, the challenges faced by lawyers dealing with clients relying on AI tend to lead to an increase in legal costs (despite the client’s intention normally being to reduce legal costs). Gen AI tools may also cause potential compromises in a client’s position, rather than the strongest arguments and strategies being advanced.
At Norling Law, we pride ourselves on excellence and innovation. We ourselves use AI tools to provide our clients the very best in the most cost-efficient ways. However, our ultimate focus is to guide clients through uncertainty while providing the highest-quality legal advice and work based on extensive experience and access to legal databases.
We encourage our clients to actively partake in their legal matters by carefully reviewing the legal advice we provide and engaging in providing us with well-considered instructions. However, to mitigate the risks of lawyer-client trust erosion, inadvertent waiver of solicitor-client privilege/confidentiality, and increased costs, we recommend that client AI adoption is closely monitored in the correct context or otherwise avoided entirely.
At Norling Law, our lawyers are of the highest calibre from various backgrounds in the legal industry. Each lawyer is matched to each client based on the client’s specific needs and the lawyer’s unique set of skills, training, and experience to enable them to tailor a bespoke strategy for each client’s matter.
Book a free 30-minute consultation today.
To end with a final remark: You would not ask your Chatbot to perform brain surgery on you. So, do not leave high-risk legal work with a Chatbot either. Let our lawyers provide you with professional and excellent quality legal services instead.
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