As more and more technology is becoming available for people to use to make their jobs easier, the expectations have changed along with it. This is especially prevalent in the legal profession where we are watching AI become an amazing tool for research and automation of otherwise time consuming tasks. But with this advancement comes a new expectation to get it done quick.
For example, back when there was no Westlaw or Lexis and no AI to help us with advanced searches, lawyers would need to dig through countless books to find cases. Every time I use my computer to do research I think "thank god I am going to law school now and not 30 years ago when everything was in books". It would take forever. Remember when Professor Bassett said no one has those books for function anymore, just for looks? Because of how much work went into this research, the expectations were pretty low in how fast things could be accomplished. Now in the world of Shepardizing and AI looking over our briefs to make sure the cases cited are good law, the expectation is that this work is "easier" and shouldn't take too long. After all, where a search for a case used to take hours, it now takes minutes or even seconds.
I think it is also interesting to see how people's attitudes towards legal work change because of the accessibility to technology. Clients want some sort of instant gratification and access at all times. Back in the day, I wouldn't be able to call you with an update on the case unless I was in the office with my landline. Now I can email you at 3 a.m. or call you from a different country while on-the-go. I can work from home and have access to thousands of documents digitally or even do this while on vacation.
Having this 24/7 access to everything makes people think that since you can access it, you need to do it. This is similar to the productivity hustle culture where is you aren't always "on" and making the most of your time with the tools you have, you are not being productive.
Technology has so many benefits and I am so grateful that we have the research tools and ability to access anything, anytime, anywhere. However, with this easier way of doing things comes a change in client and peer expectation to have it done much faster.
Hi Sierra,
ReplyDeleteI almost refuse to contemplate how much I would dread legal research if I had to go hunting in a massive library. Perhaps there should be some estimation for the amount of money that had to be billed for those long-winded researching escapades.
I wonder where the advancement halts. Lexis released their AI recently, but feedback has been less than ideal because of the lack of creativity the tool has compared to ChatGPT. The benefit of Lexis though is the dataset the tool is trained on. It is "cleaner" data fueled with legal concepts. Despite this claim, though, I'm curious what the error rate is in the content it provides.
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat GPT can "hallucinate" and provide entirely made-up case and statutory citations because they are just autocomplete on steroids. They cannot reason and are not sentient. They crawl (very quickly) the web and look for what should be the next word, sentence, or paragraph to respond to the prompt. Obviously, the web is full of misinformation, and AI results will be as well. The benefit of using AI with a limited and fully vetted database like Lexis and Westlaw maintain is that there will be few if any hallucinations. The downside is lack of creativity. I am looking forward to Microsoft's Copilot in OneDrive where it can have it limit its work to just my collection of briefs and research that I have accumulated over several decades.
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