How ChatGPT Can Benefit Law Firms (And Its Pitfalls)

ChatGPT is a powerful language model that has the potential to revolutionise the way we interact with and utilise artificial intelligence in our daily lives. Its ability to generate human-like text allows it to assist with a wide range of tasks that involve language processing, making it a valuable tool for businesses, researchers, and individuals alike. We would love to take credit for this eloquent opening sentence, but in truth, this is a quote from ChatGPT when asked to describe itself. Since its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT has stormed into the minds (and sometimes hearts) of businesspeople, students, and everyone else required to use written language in their day-to-day activity. ChatGPT undoubtedly provides several benefits for those in the legal profession; however, for the moment at least, they should be used with caution.

Before examining how a law firm can utilise ChatGPT, let’s briefly set out what this new technology actually is.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT stands for "Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer". It was developed by OpenAI and is currently free[1]. According to its developer, ChatGPT is, "an artificial intelligence trained to assist with a variety of tasks." Put simply, it is a language model AI devised to produce human written language and talk to people.

To use ChatGPT, you enter a question or request copy on a particular topic (for example, 500 words on the best hotel in London) in a text box. Within seconds, ChatGPT will present the answer, article, or essay which is based on the information to which it has access. This is primarily the 300 billion words OpenA| scraped from the internet, books, articles, websites, and blog posts. Although ChatGPT can access portions of the Internet via integration with selected partners such as Expedia and Slack, it cannot plug in and access the entire Web (yet).

How can law firm’s use ChatGPT to their advantage?

Chat GPT provides several opportunities for law firms and individual Solicitors to delegate time-consuming tasks. For example,

• Marketing personnel can use ChatGPT to create general social media posts about the firm, create content ideas, and identify keywords for SEO purposes.

• ChatGPT can automatically answer common questions, for example: How does the conveyancing or divorce process work? Is legal aid available for my case?

• Standard documents such as a Letter Before Action and job descriptions can be drafted quickly using ChatGPT.

What are the risks for the legal profession when using ChatGPT?

The most significant risk for legal professionals when using ChatGPT is that the copy it delivers is not always accurate. Furthermore, the scraped data only goes up to 2021, which means any post-2021 changes in statue and case law will not be picked up by the programme.

Privacy is also an enormous concern. Law firms often deal with sensitive personal data. If a Solicitor uses ChatGPT to draft a Will, this document, personal client information and all, will become part of the tool’s database, further training the AI and potentially being used in responses to other people’s requests.

The other problem which has swiftly been identified in AI tools is bias. The output received is only as good as the input the tool has used to learn. Ask for a legal opinion on an ethical issue such as GMOs or assisted dying and there is no guarantee the answer will be objective. Of course, it can be argued that all humans are biased, and this is true. However, if you write a subjective opinion on the law around GMOs, you can back up your views with references, allowing the reader to explore your sources and come to their own opinion about whether they agree with you. ChatGPT cannot provide sources for the information and opinions it presents.

Concluding comments

ChatGPT is a powerful tool but presently, there are serious flaws which make it too precarious for any business to risk its reputation by using it exclusively to communicate with clients and customers.

There are also significant questions over how organisations can use the technology and remain compliant with the GDPR and Data Protection Act 1998. In addition, there are multiple lawsuits in progress concerning the scraping of content by AI developers without permission. For example, Stability AI, the London-based company behind Stable Diffusion, is being taken to court by Getty Images which claims that the company “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata” to train its AI model. This is in addition to a class action suit brought by artists who argue their original work was scraped from the Internet without permission and used to train the tool. And OpenAI, along with Microsoft, and GitHub are currently subject to a lawsuit in the US for making Copilot, an automatic code generator trained on existing code available online. The engineers who wrote the code were never approached to provide consent for this type of use.

Perhaps the safest strategy for now is to use ChatGPT for basic tasks, subject to its output being checked by a good old-fashioned human being.

Albion Legal provides a range of added value products and services, from bespoke employment disputes insurance cover to white-labelled HR software. To discuss any points in the above article or to find out how we can help your business, please phone 0113 2471 717 or email our team.

[1] In early March OpenAI announced the release of ChatGPT Plus which is available on a paid subscription. Subscribers will receive ongoing access to the tool, faster response times, and priority access to new features.