Transcription
Hi Anne Pearson, founder of the Paralegal Boot Camp. Thanks for joining me today.
Well, I'm sorry I haven't been putting out regular episodes, and it's really because I've just been really busy and I'm getting our new course done, the AI Boot Camp for Legal Professionals. It launches on January 20th, and there's a lot to do before then. I'll put a link in the description to learn more about it.
So, as I've been developing this new course, it's bringing back some memories. Back in 2010, when I was telling litigation paralegals that they needed to get up to speed on e-discovery. Some did, some didn't, some still haven't. So I want to start by reminding you about something that I'm constantly asking you to do, which is place your career security above your job security.
For those who are new and don't know what that means, let's say you're a litigation paralegal working in a law firm that barely goes to trial. So you're really good at drafting discovery, doing legal research, managing document productions. But you've been out of school for 10 years, and you've never seen the inside of a courtroom. Naturally, when you see webinars on topics that you do a lot of work in, say the discovery phase, you sign up. You want to do, um, the work and be a master at that work, and that's perfectly fine. But if something happens to that job, if you lose that job, when you go to start applying for other positions, they're all asking for trial experience. And in the last 10 years, you've never even attended a training session on trial prep, let alone had the opportunity to go to trial. So you've severely handicapped your career security by only focusing on the small area that you were specializing in.
I've also talked about this from an e-discovery perspective. As a litigation paralegal, if you say, "Well, we don't do e-discovery at this firm," if you're operating from the career security mindset, then you still go out and learn everything you can about e-discovery. Maybe even try to get your attorney that you're used to doing this, you know, small document production with, you get them to do it electronically. They receive the PST file of emails from the client and ask you to print out all the emails or save them as PDFs, um, that, you know, they can mark up. Instead, you tell the attorney that you've taken some classes on e-discovery and you found a tool that can cut down the time that it'll take to do that project, and you'd like a shot at doing that. Ultimately, if you don't ever do that, when that job goes away and you start interviewing for other litigation paralegal positions, you're going to be reducing your job potential and therefore severely impacting your career security. In fact, I had a guest on the podcast a while back, Michael Corduro. He's the president of ACEDS, and he said, "You're not really doing litigation if you're not doing e-discovery."
So let's take AI as an example. Maybe you work at a law firm that doesn't allow anyone to use AI yet because the firm is still working out the kinks and setting policies. And while they do that, there's a small beta group of people testing its use, but you're not one of the beta users. Don't be that person who idly sits by waiting to be told that now's the time to start learning to use AI. Or worse yet, your firm doesn't even have any plans to incorporate AI into the practice of law, so you don't see a need to use it at all. What's going to happen to your career in five years when you have to go find another job and you haven't taken the time to learn much of anything about AI? Just like 15 or 20 years ago, the legal professionals who didn't embrace the technology that could allow them to efficiently and quickly review 20 gigabytes of records, a few years later, then it became 200 gigabytes, then it became 2 terabytes. What's that costing the client compared to a firm who uses the latest e-discovery tools? So with AI, get ahead of this. Get comfortable using AI. Your attorney doesn't have the time to learn all of the ins and outs of how it works. You have a huge opportunity here. One way you can do that is to join me in January in the AI Boot Camp when that launches. But even if you don't want to do that, get the training from somewhere. Please. I really think this is where you're going to be able to set yourself apart from others. Be the AI expert at your firm. Those who don't embrace it and master the use of AI, they're going to be at a competitive disadvantage. Maybe not right away in 2025, but I think we'll definitely start seeing that competitive disadvantage by 2026 and beyond, for sure. Get ready for it now.
Which brings me to what I want to talk to you about: the ABA Formal Opinion 512. This came out in July, and it's the ABA's ethical opinion on using artificial intelligence tools in the practice of law. If you work for a lawyer, this applies to you, regardless of your title. So the ABA had four areas or recommendations on the topic of AI. Areas that I wanted to bring to your attention. So I want to bring these topics to your attention because maybe your attorney hasn't checked out those yet, right? And they're the areas that are of most concern why people aren't using AI. So if you can get a handle on these, then you might feel more comfortable using it. So there's technical competence, client confidentiality, setting internal policies, and independent verification.
First, technical competence. This comes from the ABA's Model Rule 1.1. This was back in 2012. You've probably heard me talk about it, and it's known as the Technology Amendments. And in it, they said that a lawyer has a duty to understand the benefits and the risks associated with the technology used in their law firms. Back then, it meant things, at least to me, like e-discovery and trial technology or online due diligence software tools. Now, it means AI tools. You might be thinking, "Wait a minute, my attorney is one of those ones who says, 'Print out the emails so that I can give them to them and read them.' They, they want to read them in print." That's not what I'm referring to. Well, it kind of is. But here's the more important point, which applies to you as you support the attorney. In Formal Opinion 512, I found it interesting that the ABA said that lawyers, um, can ordinarily achieve the requisite level of competency by either engaging in self-study or associating with another competent lawyer or consulting with someone who has sufficient expertise in the field. That means you, the paralegal or legal assistant who supports that attorney. The opinion went on from there and said that lawyers need not become AI experts. They just need to have an understanding of the technology's benefits and risks and consult with others who are proficient in it. So yes, that's you.
Second was client confidentiality. This is a big one, but mostly only if you're using an AI tool that's not proprietary to the firm. Most of the larger firms have proprietary internal AI tools for that reason. But let's say you're working at a smaller firm that doesn't have any restrictions on using something like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. So you jump in there and you tell ChatGPT that you need help drafting a motion to dismiss on X issue. If that's all you say, then it's garbage in and garbage out. It doesn't know the jurisdiction or any other information except why you need a motion to dismiss. So you add in some facts, that's good. But have you added in too many case-specific facts that could identify the client, or enough facts of the case that someone could reasonably find out the identity of the client? But here's the bigger issue. Let's say that you're in a larger firm with proprietary AI tools that are not sharing the information to train the general public AI model. Everything is limited to internal firm information, and you're only training the firm's AI model. Okay. But what about the client walls where a conflict of interest was waived to allow the firm to represent that client at the same time as another client? What about the file clerk who works in a different department and hasn't had any formal training on confidentiality, especially to know how to compare it to attorney-client privilege? Maybe they read the firm's manual on day one, but they've been there for a few years now. The ABA opinion specifically said that lawyers must evaluate the risk that the information will be disclosed or accessed by others inside the firm, inside the firm, who will not adequately protect the information from improper disclosure. Another example that was referenced in the ABA opinion was when one attorney inputs information into the internal AI tool relating to the representation. Their AI tool uses information to learn. Then another lawyer at the same firm later receives a response to their prompt, and it reveals information in its response that it revealed to the other lawyer-client. If your firm is not using AI yet, it's because of complicated situations like this. So be patient. If they haven't adopted it yet, they have to get a handle on some of this. There are just so many moving parts.
Which leads me to the third one, which is setting internal policies. I'm not going to go into detail on this one because it's more of a management issue. But I can tell you that it's not just about setting policies, it's also communicating the policies internally and externally to the clients, potentially. They also touched on how this relates to billing, which I thought was interesting, and I talked about it briefly during my Bill Blower Boot Camp group coaching call this month, um, because the ABA made it pretty clear in that opinion that a lawyer must bill their actual time. Which means if you're using AI to get something done in 15 minutes, that's what you bill for. You can't add in time or the cost of the AI tool, other things like that. All right.
And finally, independent verification. Now, they didn't have a separate subsection on this topic, but they did write about it throughout the opinion. Independent verification is a given after what we heard in the news about lawyers using AI and getting called out for citing fake cases. We could have a whole separate video on just why that happens, you know, hallucinations and that type of thing. For now, think about independent verification like this: if you delegate a portion of your project to another paralegal or someone else in the office and then just turn in that paralegal's work product the way they gave it to you without verifying that the work was correct, then it's essentially the same as if you made the error yourself. When you're working with AI, you have to independently verify that the work is correct, as if you've delegated the work to AI. Now, it's your work.
So that's my take on that ABA Formal Opinion. It's ABA Formal Opinion 512. I would highly encourage you to read it in its entirety as you start using AI tools in your work. Before I let you go, this is going to be the last video of 2024. So I want to wish you the happiest of holidays. I do hope that you get some time off, that you get to spend it with people that bring you joy and happiness. I appreciate that you've given up some of your valuable time to be with me today and stick with me to the end of this video. So I'll be back in January 20202, 2020, 25, January 2025 to help you make it your best year yet.