Steve Palmer [00:00:00]:

Steve Palmer here, LawyerTalkPodcast.com coming at you. Q and A style. That means question and answer, but you already knew that. We're going to jump right into it. I got a question here from Mark. Hey Steve, love the podcast. I work for a medium sized company and we often outsource our legal work for things like contracts, lawsuits, etc. I see a lot of talk about AI in the legal profession and whether AI will replace the need for lawyers.

Steve Palmer [00:00:25]:

I'd love to hear your thoughts on AI and what you think about all of this. This is a great question. And it's, I read the same articles now. Look, I do criminal defense work up at my regular life in my regular law practice called Palmer Legal Defense, but I actually use AI upstairs now. I think I'm, I'm, I tend to drag behind sometimes on the technology. So I wasn't, I'm certainly not the first to enter into the AI world. But look, this is a, I think like a lot of professions, AI is sort of challenging our basic notions of how we've always done things and whether we actually need to do things with real people or not. And I think there is a place for AI in law firms, particularly bigger law firms and even smaller, I guess that will ultimately maybe eliminate some, some of the need for actual manual labor.

Steve Palmer [00:01:17]:

And let me tell you how I, I see this going forward. So first, document review. I do a lot of work with some white collar work in federal cases. I've always got one or two of those going on. And even some state court cases where we file a demand for discovery and the prosecutor gives us thousands of pages. It used to be banker's boxes. In the old days, I'd have to, the agents for the government would deliver banker's boxes full of documents actually to my office and we'd have to go through all that stuff. And then it shifted over to electronic delivery of PDFs.

Steve Palmer [00:01:50]:

But either way, we still have to get through that stuff. I mean, we still have to. If I'm representing a client and my client says, look, I paid you to do the case and there's 2,000 pages or 10,000 pages of documents, what's in there? And I'm like, well, give me some time, I'll have to go through it. Now in a bigger law firm or even a medium or small size law firm that's billing you hourly, think about the legal time that's going to be spent. There's ways I offset that. I sometimes have my paralegals or law clerks go through the stuff and keep me apprised of what's in there. But that's not always a perfect substitute for me doing it because I need to know I have a different eye than others do. But now a lot of people are using AI to summarize what's in the documents.

Steve Palmer [00:02:36]:

So with respect to document review, I can now click either in Adobe Acrobat or one of the other AI platforms, summarize what's here. Now, these are legal, specific platforms. So the big, the big publishers, whether it's west or whether it's Lexus, they're selling their version of this product, but you run it through their product and they give you a summary of what's there. It's not perfect, but it's often very useful to get me in the door or at least narrow down my focus of where I need to look for more specific stuff. So if I see a topic that catches my eye, I go back and I read the source material and not just rely on the AI. Which brings up a good point. You can't just rely on the AI because AI isn't perfect. They don't see things that, they don't see that other dimensional focus that you want if you're going to prepare an actual defense to a case.

Steve Palmer [00:03:26]:

But it can be really helpful to find things that fit within your theory or maybe are if you're looking for stuff that doesn't fit within your theory and you've got to deal with it. And AI is a great platform for that. The other thing I use AI for a lot is transcribing audio and video interviews. So I've got, you know, back in the old days we used to complain that we didn't get actual, that the police didn't record everything they did. And we were thinking, you know, usobs, you should record everything you do. If you're interviewing a witness, we should have a recording of it. Well, now they do. And we had to be careful what we wish for because now we get it in a typical case and say there's four or five police officers at a scene, they all have body cameras on their chest and they have dash cameras in their cars.

Steve Palmer [00:04:11]:

And if they take somebody to the police station, they've got video and audio equipment, they're recording everything. So I've got hours of footage that I need to watch and review and I can run that stuff through AI and get a transcript. Anybody who's ever sat down and tried to listen to an interview and really get all you can out of it without a transcript, it's difficult to do it. And then if you need to reference it later, you don't have a page reference or a line reference to get that done. Now here's the thing. If it's an important witness interview, it is not sufficient to just have the transcript. If it's on video and there are cops at the scene with body cameras, I have to watch it too. So I watch it first, get the AI transcription, and then I have a way to go back and cross reference and actually get to the point we want.

Steve Palmer [00:04:58]:

So so often there's stuff that is, that does not translate onto black and white, whether it's AI transcribing it or an actual court reporter transcribing it. The third way I use AI in my practice is research. So now it used to be that when I started practicing, now you young lawyers out there, we should do a law school series on this. But you young lawyers out there in law school, you probably don't even learn anymore how to go to the books in the library and look through the dicennials and do actual old school legal research with book books. So you're only learning the platform of Lexis or Westlaw or some other online search, legal search engine. And that's like an early form of AI, but now it's gotten really advanced. So what I mean is, like if I wanted to search a topic in Westlaw or Lexis, I would just type in reasonable suspicion, Fourth Amendment car stop. And I would get a bunch of cases and I would have to read those cases and that would get me in the ballpark of the research I'm doing.

Steve Palmer [00:05:59]:

And that was great because I used to have to go to the library, sit down and go to the books to do that same kind of research. And it was a lot more difficult with AI. Now I can take it a step further and I can say, all right, AI program, I would like a legal research memorandum about this topic and what the current law is. And it's a. Everybody's worked on ChatGPT or GPT or whatever it is. It says, okay, we are working on a legal memo for you. And then it produces one and it's really detailed and good. And that can easily supplement.

Steve Palmer [00:06:36]:

I'm not going to say replace, because there's a big caveat here at the end that could easily supplement and go a long way maybe to replacing some of the hours and hours and hours of associate research time on certain topics. And then the final way, I guess related is, and I don't do this because I'm an Old school writer. I learned how to write in high school. I was lucky enough to have a great composition teacher. And then I went to a college that emphasized writing skills. I like to write. I was a history and English guy. So I write my own stuff.

Steve Palmer [00:07:07]:

But a lot of people don't. They let AI draft it for them. Or they say, AI draft me a brief on this topic. And it does. Again, there's danger here, though, and this is what I want to get into. So those are the ways. I use AI a lot, regularly. And here's the pitfalls I've seen.

Steve Palmer [00:07:27]:

First, there was a. When this first came out a couple years ago, when AI was first sort of emerging into the legal profession, there was a. I don't know if it was famous, but it was a newsworthy case where somebody. I can't remember it might have been New York. Some lawyer submitted a brief, filed an actual legal argument with a court on a topic and relied on AI. And it was just categorically wrong. And AI got the wrong answer, misinterpreted the legal research. I don't remember exactly how it was, but it was wrong.

Steve Palmer [00:07:53]:

And the lawyer submitted it, had the wrong authority or the wrong conclusion about what the authority was saying and got sanctioned. In other words, the court. He got in trouble with the court. So no matter what AI says, it's still on the lawyer, still on us, to make sure it's accurate. And I'll tell my own war story about that. I was writing a brief, it was due the next day. And as sometimes happens, as I was finalizing everything, I thought, you know what? I'm going to raise a separate issue here on this topic. I'm not just going to include it as a subtopic.

Steve Palmer [00:08:25]:

I'm going to make it a lead topic. And I was working with a law student, my law clerk, and I said, give me an AI. Let's just see what AI says about this. And we were sort of joking about it. And it cranked out a legal research memo. It analyzed. It was sort of a unique area of Ohio law. It analyzed the Ohio law and listed the cases.

Steve Palmer [00:08:45]:

It read very clean, and it was a nice little well written paragraph. And I said, look, but there's this case I just read about and where a lawyer got in trouble. So we have to check all these cases. And I did, and it was wrong. You know, ironically, the AI memo was very helpful to us. But the actual case law that it was citing didn't say what the AI memo said. It said, and I don't know Why? I got a hunch. Why? Because in law, there's like, you know, I can see why it would get confused about how the cases were written.

Steve Palmer [00:09:18]:

We call it dicta, where the judges are talking about things that aren't really bearing on the point of the case, but they might be side issues. Anyway, it got it wrong. And had I not have read those cases, I would have fallen into that same trap as the lawyers that I was talking about in that other case. So those are the pitfalls of AI. I just. And I think we're going to get to a spot where I already think there is software that recognizes things that were drafted by AI. And I can tell when my staff presents me something, whether it's internal, whether it's something to be filed, and I say, you had AI read this or draft this, didn't you? And they say, well, how'd you know? And I can tell because most of the forms, most of the documents in my office that I've used For the last 30 years, I have written. And I like the way I write, all right? I'm not married to it.

Steve Palmer [00:10:05]:

I'm open to suggestions, but I can tell when AI tries to fix it. And sometimes it fixes it with terminology and language that isn't legally common. It sounds more like something outside the legal profession. So you got to be careful with it. And I think there. Eventually there's going to be software where courts are actually running stuff through on their own to see whether something was done with chat, GPT, or some other AI platform. But, I mean, look, what's the answer to the question, is AI going to replace the legal profession? It might. And in this particular question from Mark, I guess I don't do a lot of contract work, but I know AI is used a lot in that context.

Steve Palmer [00:10:44]:

Draft a contract with these terms and it'll do it. Draft a memo with these terms and it'll do it. And you know, that's going to save legal time. Now, what is that going to do for the profession? I don't know. You know, I don't know what's next. Something will be next. AI can only go so far, and then there'll be need for labor again, and then maybe AI will replace that and it'll just keep evolving. So at the end of the day, what does AI do for the cost of legal services and how firms are managed and run? Well, here are my thoughts on that.

Steve Palmer [00:11:17]:

I think for sure this can cut down the need for extra billable hours. Or maybe this could cut down the cost of Legal services because the associate billable hours at a big law firm, for instance, you don't need it all. I mean, if AI can replace some of that, then it can help trim the fat. So maybe that's great for Mark. In a business who regularly uses lawyers, they might be able to save money. Or they could even get AI in house and maybe use AI first and then go outside for the legal. The legal validation of what they're doing. I don't know the business model.

Steve Palmer [00:11:56]:

In my practice, I'm pretty lean already. I've had as many as four associates at one point. I've had as few as none. So it's just. Sometimes it's just me and my. It is just I. I guess in my team of either law clerks or paralegals or whatever. But it's really helpful for me as a small firm because it enables me to get through more work more efficiently.

Steve Palmer [00:12:21]:

And I don't, you know, I. I don't know if it changes my billing practice. A lot of my stuff is flat rate anyway. But I can get through more work and I can, I think, do it. Maybe, maybe from my perspective, I can do a more thorough job and feel more comfortable that I'm getting everything done and that needs to be done in a timely way. And it. It probably will decrease ultimately, some of the fees that I charge my clients, because if I don't have the overhead of, say, two associates to do all the research and I can cut that down to one, even at a small scale like mine, it probably will ultimately decrease what I have to charge to cover my costs to do an appeal or whatever I'm doing for somebody. So, look, I think.

Steve Palmer [00:13:03]:

I think there's a great place for AI. You just have to understand what that place is. Proceed with caution. Anyway, lawyerertalk, podcast.com, great question. I love this topic. I'm sure we'll do more on it as well as it progresses. But you got a question? You want me to cover something? Just check us out. Until then, we're off the record, on the air.