THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL 68 | MAY 2025 Network still hosts several great podcasts targeted at lawyers. THOUGHTS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE The impact of AI over the next few years is going to be greater than most readers anticipate. The fact that lawyers first got into trouble using AI to write briefs was a lawyer competency issue, not a technology issue. Just read all the cases you cite. Hallucinations were a known possibility with those AI tools. There were articles and posts documenting this issue, but not necessarily where lawyers normally read. Everyone was talking about ChatGPT. Some research was required to understand the cautionary aspects. The OBA Management Assistance Program received many inquiries about AI tools. We are proud to have presented many CLE programs on the ethics of using AI and possible drawbacks and to have put on an AI conference this past summer.2 AI is not as new in legal circles as some believe. At one time, litigation (with a huge number of documents) involved manual document review. Firms hired young lawyers solely for the uninspiring work of spending day after day manually reading documents to deem them as “relevant” or not. But soon, those lawyers doing document review would be replaced as firms moved to predictive coding, also known as technology- assisted review (TAR). A lawyer once told me the idea of AI doing document summaries gave her a negative physical reaction. She would be haunted by the idea that the summary left out something important. But the young lawyers crammed in a warehouse doing document summaries all day were not perfect either, while e-discovery tools allowed you to use multiple queries on the evidence. For a lawyer in private practice, using AI to review and summarize documents will be an important part of law practice, even if you are not involved in e-discovery. Just imagine asking your AI to draft a motion for summary judgment using a certain fact pattern – but to only reference the forms in your MFSJ file, which contains all the motions you have drafted over the years, plus a few from opposing counsel. The odds of hallucinations are vastly reduced. Let me note again that I believe a $30 per month subscription for Microsoft Copilot is a great value. One paragraph in this column read a bit awkwardly, and I was having trouble repairing it. I highlighted the paragraph and selected “Auto Rewrite” in Copilot. In seconds, AI gave me a much-improved paragraph with a one-third reduction in length. Your vLex Fastcase legal research member benefit has a tool called Vincent AI. It is available via a separate subscription of $360 per month, which is discounted from its retail price of $400. OBA members can receive a free threeday trial with Vincent. I would encourage you to wait until you have some big legal research projects and clear your schedule to give Vincent a dedicated threeday try. Vincent provides flexible subscriptions. You can subscribe on a month-to-month basis or just for one month with no annual subscription required. A TIP FOR YOUNG LAWYERS When I co-taught a class at the OU College of Law on setting up a law practice a few years ago, I was surprised that most of the students’ business plans involved transactional practices, and many told me they had a goal of never going to the local courthouse. Since then, I’ve received similar feedback from other law students and young lawyers. I will break my self-imposed rule about not lecturing lawyers on what they should and should not do to say that young lawyers should appreciate the value of courthouses and courtrooms for society and their careers. Legal deserts exist where there are not enough lawyers, leading to severe consequences for many people that often happen in court, placing their families, their freedom and their finances at risk. Generally, many do not require the most experienced lawyers, just one committed Appearing in courthouses regularly also helps your career: You meet other lawyers, receive referrals and connect with experienced mentors. It is also fulfilling to help someone avoid or mitigate a personal disaster.
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