ULaw’s Patrick Grant deep dives into the potential benefits and pitfalls of AI in law

“I started out as a duty solicitor, something that I really enjoyed doing,” says Patrick Grant, project director (north) of legal tech and innovation at The University of Law (ULaw). “But around ten years ago, I was given a copy of Richard Susskind’s book Tomorrow’s Lawyers, which really piqued my fascination with how we can use technology to improve access to justice and make the business of law more efficient,” he continues.

The University of Law

 To prepare students for a rapidly evolving technological world and to future-proof their skills, Grant has designed three modules for ULaw’s LLB programme: Legal Tech, Legal Tech and Innovation, and 21st Century Legal Practice. “Just last January we had the early iterations of ChatGPT and today, we are already on ChatGPT4,” he says. My worry with this is training students on current technology which will very likely be outdated by the time they finish their studies!” Instead, Grant adopts a ‘nuts and bolts’ approach to his teaching and course design, focusing on processes.

The benefits of this are twofold, as Grant goes on to explain. “Firstly, everything we do in law is a process – whether you’re looking at a patent application, assessing criminal liability for theft or working through a conveyancing transaction. So, teaching law students process mapping, analysis and improvements is hugely beneficial to their core legal skills,” he says. Secondly, it means that students are aware of the mechanics behind how a technology works. “It’s easy to forget that there are nearly 10,000 law firms and sole practitioners in the UK, and only around 1,000 of these are likely to have the time, budget and expertise to leverage the latest AI and tech offerings. So, we have to teach every student about technology in a way that is valuable and applicable, regardless of whether they use legal tech in their day-to-day,” Grant continues.

TOMORROW: AI and the law — with A&O Shearman, Macfarlanes, Osborne Clarke and ULaw

Speaking about the current project he is working on, Grant elaborates on his involvement with digital transformation agency Calls9. “We have been developing a proof-of-concept for an AI welfare bot. This bot is integrated into a council website, for example, and allows users to type in their problems. It then provides advice by retrieving relevant information from within the website.” The goal is to develop the bot so that it can refer individuals in need to the appropriate agencies, thereby helping to bridge the access-to-justice gap and ensuring people receive quality advice when they need it. Additionally, Grant flags his involvement with LegalTech in Leeds, a project now in its third year. This initiative aims to unite the city’s legal and tech sectors through events and an annual conference, encouraging dialogue and connections among law firms, tech companies, academics and students.

Find out more about studying for the SQE at ULaw

Grant also offers his insights on what he sees as a common misconception among students when they think about generative AI and legal tech issues. “The biggest error is probably misunderstanding what it is. When you start out researching these topics, I’ve often found that sources don’t start with the basics — they presuppose that you already know what AI is and build on that,” he points out. As a result, people are often turned off by AI or view it as an ”electronic magic wand” with endless capabilities.

“The reality, however, is that there is a strong argument that artificial intelligence now is neither artificial nor intelligent. All it is, is a very clever application of data science. Think ChatGPT for example,” Grant says. “Yes, you’re putting in a question and getting an answer, but the basic principle is that it is a prediction engine. It doesn’t answer the question directly, but predicts what the best possible answer is, based on the data it is trained on, which I think is quite an important distinction.”

He goes on to explain that understanding these minutiae is crucial to appreciate the limits of generative AI tools, in line with the AI mantra of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. “Firstly, this means that the data we are putting into AI is vitally important to ensure the correct output.  Successes like Harvey AI, which is now quite reliable, take time to develop to ensure that these are scraping the right sources to produce accurate outputs”. Secondly, Grant notes the implications of this for students wondering how they can incorporate generative AI into their application writing process. “Gen AI is an absolutely smashing tool, used in the right circumstances. But I worry about people about becoming overly reliant on it by trusting its outputs blindly and not thinking critically about how these are generated,” he cautions. “Gen AI is incredibly helpful to help you organise your thoughts, but a good job application is a reflection of who you are — so that substance has to come from you.”

SQE Prep: Prepare to take the plunge with these revision tips and assessment advice

Discussing how applicants can build their commercial awareness in the AI/legal tech field, Grant points to the huge range of free courses on offer from a range of reputed providers. “There’s a difference between saying you understand AI, and saying that you understand its applications in a specific way based on your learning from a course”, he says. He emphasises the importance of starting out by focusing on the basics, whether that’s through reading a book or researching online, to get a firm grasp of the core principles before anything else.

Grant also contextualises the current AI discourse within the ‘hype cycle’ that occurs with every new technology and recommends that students look into this. “It starts out with the technology trigger and everyone getting dead excited about it. That excitement continually builds up until it reaches this height called the ‘peak of inflated expectations’. Then suddenly, it shoots down into a trough of disillusionment and eventually plateaus. I’d say that we’re currently at that peak, and the important thing is to be able to work out what happens when the excitement levels out”, he explains.

 Patrick Grant will be speaking at ‘AI and the law — with A&O Shearman, Macfarlanes, Osborne Clarke and ULaw’, a virtual event taking place TOMORROW. Apply now to attend.

Find out more about studying for the SQE at ULaw

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A US judge has issued a joint fine to two lawyers involved in a case where non-existent cases were submitted to the court after ChatGPT was used for legal research.

In what are thought to be the first major sanctions arising from using artificial intelligence in the legal field, Steven Schwartz and his co-worker Peter LoDuca were slapped with a joint $5,000 (£3,926) fine and ordered to inform the judges whose names were wrongfully invoked in the fake cases to provide information.

The original personal injury case was disrupted by the revelation that a claimant’s legal team member submitted a legal document containing several bogus cases.

The claimant’s lawyer, Peter LoDuca, had not prepared his own legal research but instead allowed his colleague, Steven Schwartz, to prepare it for him which he did using ChatGPT.

New York District Judge Peter Kevin Castel said Schwartz and LoDuca acted in bad faith and misled the court when they “consciously avoided” signs the cases they were using as examples were fake.

However, he found “nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance”. Instead sanctioning the lawyers because of their lack of responsibility and decision to double down on the error after the court had questioned them.

The lawyers’ firm, Levidow Levidow & Oberman, P.C., said it hasn’t decided whether to appeal yet but released a statement to Forbes saying they “fully intend to comply” with the court’s order, but “respectfully disagree” that anyone at the firm “acted in bad faith”.

“We continue to believe that in the face of what even the court acknowledged was an unprecedented situation, we made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” the statement continued.

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AI-powered “robots” could be used to make judicial decisions — albeit initially very minor ones — the Master of the Rolls has said.

In an online lecture delivered last week at the Law and Technology Conference, Sir Geoffrey Vos said: “I believe that [AI] may also, at some stage, be used to take some (at first, very minor) decisions.”

He followed this with the caveat that controls will be required, specifically “for the parties to know what decisions are taken by judges and what by machines” and “for there always to be the option of an appeal to a human judge”.

However, Sir Geoffrey concedes that there are still limiting factors in the involvement of machines in judicial decisions. Key amongst them is the ability of a justice system to inspire the confidence of its citizens and businesses, without which it cannot function.

“There are some decisions — like for example intensely personal decisions relating to the welfare of children — that humans are unlikely ever to accept being decided by machines,” the top judge acknowledged. “But in other kinds of less intensely personal disputes, such as commercial and compensation disputes, parties may come to have confidence in machine-made decisions more quickly than many might expect.”

Nonetheless, he pointed out that there are currently many areas of professional expertise where AI opinion is considered reliable, giving the example of skin cancer diagnosis:

“The machine has seen many more skin cancers than any doctor and its advice is already, I believe, a valuable adjunct to the tools available to medical professionals.”

Sir Geoffrey’s comments follow a story reported by Legal Cheek in which a New York lawyer apologised for reportedly using ChatGPT to undertake legal research, which resulted in a legal document containing several fake cases being submitted to the court.

This isn’t the first time Sir Geoffrey has spoken on AI. In a speech delivered to Lincoln’s Inn earlier this year he told his audience that AI tools such as ChatGPT are likely to transform the work of lawyers and judges, and “we will all have to get with the programme”.

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As we approach the halfway point of the year, Legal Cheek writer Divyansh Sharma caught up with The University of Law Deputy Vice-Chancellor Peter Crisp, to discuss the issues that have impacted the legal sector so far and what’s to come in the months ahead. Here is his top four list.

1. The SQE

Most aspiring solicitors will now be familiar with the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), the new two-part assessment to qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales. Next year is “big” for the centralised assessment, according to Crisp, as this is when many law firms start their transition to the SQE. “2024 is the year when the training contract will most likely start to disappear and become Qualifying Work Experience (QWE), a term used to denote the mandatory two-year work experience under the new route,” says Crisp. QWE is more flexible and does not require compulsory experience in areas such as litigation, unlike a traditional training contract.

But with the SQE come new challenges. One of the top ones is preparation to sit and pass the exams is not enough, with law firms requiring future trainees to undertake additional practice area and skills-focused modules and courses so they are practice-ready. In fact, a recent Legal Cheek survey found more than 85% of the law firms surveyed require this from their future trainees. Expanding on these findings, Crisp says: “This is a very strong message from the profession. SQE does not have modules like M&A and banking. This means you would struggle as a trainee in a corporate-heavy law firm.”

Crisp advises students complete additional courses beyond the SQE which can make them more attractive to law firms. He explains: “There are two things to be mindful of as a student seeking to qualify through this route: First is completion of the regulator’s requirements, which include passing the SQE and completing the mandatory QWE. The second is to understand what will make you more attractive to law firms — and this is where students must go beyond the SQE and think about what will prepare them for legal practice.”

2. ChatGPT

Amidst the rhetoric around ChatGPT’s potential to replace lawyers, Crisp remains positive. “The concerns we are raising around ChatGPT today are similar to the ones that were voiced when Google search came about,” he remarks, adding that “human intervention cannot be completely done away with.”

Recently, a lawyer in the US who relied on ChatGPT ended up citing non-existent cases in the courtroom, which Crisp tells me “is a classic example of why human oversight is needed on artificial intelligence (AI) tools”. But given AI’s potential, “we must look to exploit it to enhance the profession, including legal education”, he adds.

That said, Crisp doesn’t completely negate the concerns around common lawyer tasks being replaced by AI. “There is no reason why some legal tasks cannot be undertaken by AI. Flotation, or offering a company’s shares to the public, is a good example. This involves a series of compliance steps that lawyers are required to check. In principle, a lot of this can be done by AI,” he adds.

3. The future of remote-working

As the profession adjusts to the post-Covid era, law firms are gradually beginning to tweak their remote-working policies in favour of more in-office days. Recently, Skadden mandated its lawyers to work from the office four days a week. This follows similar moves by firms such as Davis Polk in their US office.

According to Crisp, there are a lot of good sides to working from the office, especially for junior lawyers. “As a trainee, you pick up a lot osmotically. You are observing how people behave and react to different situations,” he says, adding that the ‘socialisation’ of a trainee goes missing in work-from-home set-ups. “You can of course easily do lots of work remotely, for example due diligence, and pick up many legal skills remotely. But what you can’t learn is how to interact with clients and behave as a solicitor in the real world.”

More facetime in the office also means you can ask ‘stupid’ questions, Crisp jokes. “It is much easier to get small queries clarified when you are working from the office. You can simply go to a senior and say, ‘This may be a really stupid question but I wondered…’ and that is all it takes!” This isn’t always the same in a virtual set-up as juniors often don’t want to put their small or perceivably ‘stupid’ questions in writing in emails or texts.

4. ESG on the agenda

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is hot on the agenda for law firms and their clients. As businesses seek to improve their ESG credentials, they are asking law firms more detailed questions around areas such as supply chain management, data privacy and green finance. This, of course, also drives ESG commitments within law firms.

According to Crisp, aspiring lawyers must keep up to speed with the latest trends and market movements in this space. “Social responsibility is not just about pro bono and volunteering, but now involves things like climate change and the move towards net zero,” says Crisp. “Anybody going forward in a legal career should be aware of these trends and how they impact law firms.”

Building commercial awareness around up-and-coming areas like ESG is an integral part of becoming a better lawyer. “Ultimately, no client is coming to you because they love the law. They are coming to you because they want to do something, go on a journey, perhaps buy a business or even take a loan. As a lawyer, you must have clarity on your role here, which is to understand their business and help them achieve what they want to achieve,” explains Crisp.

Ahead of his appearance at next week’s Legal Cheek Summer Vacation Scheme and Law Fair, Crisp encourages students to be proactive in their participation and network with firms and lawyers. “Don’t just be a passenger but try to be actively involved. Law firms want to get to know you and what shapes you as a person. Events like these are great opportunities to show your personality and learn more about your potential workplaces.”

Peter Crisp will be speaking at The Legal Cheek Summer 2023 Virtual Vacation Scheme and Law Fair, run in partnership with The University of Law, which takes place next week from Monday 19 June until Friday 23 June. You can apply to attend the scheme, which is free, now.

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The vast majority of lawyers recognise AI’s ability to undertake legal work, new research has found, but many feel the profession is better off keeping them separate.

A recent survey undertaken by Thomson Reuters found that a whopping 82% of lawyers agreed that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools could be applied to their day-to-day legal work. Just 7% felt it could not be applied and 10% said they were unsure.

A smaller majority of lawyers (51%) believe AI should be applied to legal work while nearly a quarter (24%) said it should not. Twenty-five percent were unsure.

The survey, which questioned 440 lawyers at large and mid-size law firms in the UK, US and Canada, forms part of a new report which takes a “deep look at the evolving attitudes towards generative AI and ChatGPT within law firms”.

It found that while awareness of ChatGPT and generative AI was high, application among law firms remained low, with just 3% of respondents using it right now. However, over a third (34%) said their firm was still considering whether to use it or not.

In response to the potential risks from using AI for legal work, 15% of respondents reported that their firms had warned them against its “unauthorised” use, while 6% said their firm had banned its usage outright. Key concerns include the technology’s “accuracy and security”, most specially around client confidentially, according to the report.

There’s been much discussion recently around AI and what impact it will have on the legal profession.

The Master of the Rolls recently warned that ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 will transform the work of lawyers and judges, and “we will all have to get with the programme”.

Elsewhere, Paul Philip, the top boss at the Solicitors Regulation Authority, questioned the ChatBot on how advancements in technology will likely impact the Solicitors Qualifying Exam. The bot’s answer? Well, it depends. Spoken like a true lawyer.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 are likely to transform the work of lawyers and judges, the Master of the Rolls has said, and “we will all have to get with the programme”.

In a speech delivered last week at Lincoln’s Inn Sir Geoffrey Vos said: “GPT-4 and other advanced machine learning is likely to transform the work that lawyers need to do and possibly even, in the slightly longer term, the business of judging.”

He noted how a previous version of GPT-4 scored in the bottom 10% when it took the US bar exam, but the most recent version came in the top 10%.

“This demonstrates the speed at which generative AI is developing. It perhaps makes the point that there is a real possibility that AI may become more intelligent and capable than humans,” said Sir Geoffrey. “It is obvious that these advances will affect the legal world as much as any other part of our society.”

He also mentioned how judicial decisions could soon be delivered by machines:

“I think that AI will be used within digital justice systems and may, at some stage, be used to take some (at first, very minor) decisions.”

The controls that will be required, according to Sir Geoffrey, are “(a) for the parties to know what decisions are taken by judges and what by machines, and (b) for there always to be the option of an appeal to a human judge”.

The “limiting feature” is likely to be the need that citizens and businesses have confidence in the judicial system. “There are some decisions — like for example intensely personal decisions relating to the welfare of children, that humans are unlikely ever to accept being decided by machines,” he added. “But in the commercial field, the controls that will be necessary on automated decision-making will rapidly become very complex indeed because of […] the speed with which AI is being developed.”

Sir Geoffrey’s comments mark one of the first instances where a senior legal figure has acknowledged the impact of new disruptive AI tools. Last week it was reported the Solicitors Regulation Authority chief executive used ChatGPT to ask whether advances in technology would change the Solicitors Qualifying Exam, with the chatbot deferring Paul Philip back to the regulator.

ChatGPT has already been used in foreign courts, as a judge claimed to have used it to aid a decision in Columbia.

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The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) chief executive used ChatGPT to ask whether advances in technology would change the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), with the chatbot deferring Paul Philip back to the regulator.

Philip asked the tool, developed by OpenAI, whether the SQE would change to reflect artificial intelligence (AI). It concluded that it depends on how much the sector adopted AI, while any decision to change would require consultation and approval from the SRA.

“So it looks like the ball is back in our court,” wrote Philip in Legal Futures today. “A helpful reminder that currently AI is only an assistant not a replacement for important decision making.”

The SQE is comprised of two exams: SQE1 examines functioning legal knowledge through a series of multiple-choice questions whilst SQE2 tests practical legal skills. Philip went on to confirm the regulator has no plans to change any of the fundamentals of the SQE.

His comments came after a university lecturer used the AI tool to see if he could pass the SQE. Dr Andrew Gilbert of the Open University achieved 50% on SQE1 using SRA practice questions. “This is impressive,” said Philip. “It probably won’t be long until AI achieves near-perfect scores.”

He said, however, that “just because a lawyer can look something up doesn’t invalidate the need for them to be able to understand the law”.

“Even if a lawyer can generate a decent legal answer from AI, they still need to be able to assess its validity,” he continued. “They also need the skills to be able to apply that knowledge usefully — from problem solving to being able to build a rapport with a client and understand their needs.”

Philip suggested that AI could lead to a “revolution” in the training market by using a candidate’s data to understand their interests and learning styles. “It can then tailor training content to keep you engaged, while also focusing on areas of weakness,” he added.

There have been many interesting use cases of ChatGPT in the legal sector since its launch in November 2022. A judge claims to have used it in a court ruling in Columbia, whilst a university academic used the bot to pass a contract law exam.

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A university academic has pitted ChatGPT against a first-year law degree exam paper in contract law, with underwhelming results.

Senior law lecturer at the University of Westminster, Dr Ioannis Glinavos, asked the bot to answer a selection of sample exam questions taken from a Pearson law textbook available online.

One scenario considered a contract to build a motor yacht for a computer tycoon and required ChatGPT to provide advice in response to supply chain issues and changes to a payment plan. Unfortunately, the bot’s response was marked as “tactical advice, not legal advice”, and unlikely to gain a pass mark in a law examination.

The bot’s responses continued to be hit and miss in all of the questions put to it, leading Glinavos to conclude its performance was equivalent to that of an average first-year law student. “The bot could sit in my class and I wouldn’t know the difference,” he said in the video (below).

Like most students the bot had areas of strength and weakness. Glinavos explained, “it can identify correctly the relevant legal issues but it struggles with analysis and authority.”

“The bot is very close to the average student performance, thus not easily detectable as an AI-produced answer,” said Glinavos. Ruling that ultimately the bot’s attempt at the exam paper scored around 45% but was still good enough to merit a pass.

He finishes with a warning that current AI-detection tools for exams are not yet advanced enough to competently detect students using these types of tools to cheat. “It will eventually lead to the abandonment of online timed exams that are not proctored,” he predicted.

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A Reddit user has asked ChatGPT to put a spin on a caselaw classic, asking it to explain the facts of Donoghue v Stevenson in a “gangsta way”.

The results, user ‘LyingKnee’ said, are “too funny not to share”. Here they are:

“Yo, listen up fam, let me tell you about the Donoghue v Stevenson case. It’s a lit story that went down back in the day in Scotland, you feel me?

So basically, this girl Donoghue was chilling with her homie and sipping on some ginger beer from a bottle that her pal copped for her. But then, things got real when she found a dead snail in her drink! That’s straight up nasty, right?

So Donoghue was like, “Yo, Stevenson, what the actual f***?! You put a snail in my drink and I could’ve gotten sick or some sht!” But Stevenson was like, “Nah, that ain’t my problem, I didn’t even know you were gonna drink that sht!”

But Donoghue was not having it and took Stevenson to court. And guess what? The judge was like, “Yo, Stevenson, you owe Donoghue a duty of care, so you gotta make sure your sh*t is legit before you sell it to other people. And since you didn’t do that, you gotta pay up, son.”

And that’s how the Donoghue v Stevenson case became a gangsta classic, where the courts recognized that businesses gotta be responsible for their products and not be putting no snails in people’s drinks, you know what I’m saying?”

This could be “a great way to remember case facts”, one Reddit user suggested, whilst another tried it for caselaw classic Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.

The iconic judgment was handed down over 90 years ago on 26 May 1932 and established the modern civil law tort of negligence. Since then it’s inspired artwork and even a student-made snail sanctuary!

Back in December we asked the chat bot to explain ‘who is it I can sue if I find a snail in my ginger beer bottle under English law’, but Donoghue v Stevenson sadly did not get a shout out.

Follow @legalcheek on TikTok for our spin on caselaw classics.

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ChatGPT has been going from strength to strength recently but a new study may have finally found its limits.

Northern Irish firm SG Murphy Solicitors pitted the popular chatbot against high street lawyers in a number of legal scenarios and found that it struggled to compete.

One of the big problems they encountered was that 9% of the chatbot’s answers were factually incorrect. Though to be fair to the bot, the limitation list on its website includes the disclaimer: “may occasionally generate incorrect information”.

The report gives an example of one of these incorrect answers where the bot was asked: “What do I need to prove to claim a prescriptive easement in the UK?” In the bot’s response, it advised the imaginary client that they would need to prove necessity and that prescriptive easements were rare — both of which the authors said were incorrect.

There was also a lack of detail in three-quarters of the chatbot’s responses, meaning they were below the quality expected from their human counterparts. The report suggests the AI’s information was at a “basic and general level”, and its advice “does not match the quality level that we would expect to receive from an experienced lawyer”.

This lack of detail highlighted another key difference between the AI and a real lawyer: AI doesn’t ask questions. The researchers observed that, unlike real lawyers, ChatGPT made no requests for further information and which limited its ability to give tailored advice.

It was, however, able to provide information tailored to jurisdiction. When a question contained information that related to a particular jurisdiction, the bot picked up on this and adjusted its response accordingly. One example of this saw the bot successfully detailing the grounds for divorce in Northern Ireland.

Because of these drawbacks, the study’s authors came to the conclusion that while ChatGPT has a great deal of potential to help lawyers do their job more efficiently and effectively, in the short-term it cannot compete with experienced real-life lawyers due to its inability to provide tailored, precise, and — most importantly — correct advice.

However, they did highlight the tool’s aptitude for drafting simple agreements, indicating that this is the application for which it would be most useful.

Legal Cheek has reported many stories concerning the AI tool recently. It has been used by a Colombian judge to assist in a legal ruling, asked to write poetry, and even successfully answered questions on the Watson Glaser test.

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A Colombian court case was recently heard in the metaverse with participants using virtual reality headsets and interacting via avatars.

Magistrate María Victoria Quiñones Triana of the Administrative Court of Magdalena granted the hearing which was heard using Meta’s Horizon Workrooms on Wednesday, and live-streamed on YouTube (below).

The hearing was conducted in Spanish, with the Colombian magistrate reportedly instructing participants to secure Oculus Quest 2 eyeglasses and configure their avatars in advance. However, those without access to VR headsets are understood to have had the option to take part via a standard video call.

The magistrate instructed participants to enter a verification code to prove their identities and ordered regular breaks during the two and half hours proceedings.

She is also said to have consulted the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT on whether to allow the case to be held in the virtual setting, asking it questions such as: ‘What is an avatar?’

Courts around the world seem to be pushing the boundaries of new technologies. In September, Siming District Court in Xiamen, China reportedly heard two cases in the metaverse.

Meanwhile, Colombia was in the news again this month after a judge, who presides over the First Circuit Court in Cartagena, said he used ChatGPT to assist in his legal decision. The South American country passed legislation last year enabling the use of emerging technologies in judicial proceedings.

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As ChatGPT hype hits fever pitch, Mishcon de Reya is looking to recruit an engineer to help explore how the AI tool can be used by its lawyers.

In a job ad posted to LinkedIn, the London law firm says it has been experimenting with natural language processing models and believes the advent of ChatGPT marks a new era of machine learning in the legal sector.

Keen to get ahead of its rivals, the firm is already on the hunt for a ‘GPT Legal Prompt Engineer’ with a “deep understanding of legal practice” to work alongside its lawyers and business professionals. The ideal candidate will probably — but not necessarily — have a law degree or experience working as a lawyer, according to the ad.

The unusual job listing was first spotted by legal tech consultant Daniel Greenwood, who believes this might be the “first role of this kind“.

A top law firm is hiring a "GPT Legal Prompt Engineer" in London

"We have been experimenting with various NLP models over the past 2 years. With the release of ChatGPT, signalling a new phase of widespread access to LLMs…"@goodside for Law

h/t @dazzagreenwood for surfacing pic.twitter.com/U38uj9s2S3

— John Nay (@johnjnay) February 15, 2023

The successful applicant will be responsible for understanding the firm’s requirements in an AI system, building the business use case for this technology and working closely with the firm’s data science team to develop the tech. The successful applicant would also be expected to stay up to date with the latest developments in neuro-linguistic programming and be ready to incorporate these into their work.

Speaking to Legal Cheek, Mishcon’s chief strategy officer Nick West said: “GPT3, and other generative AI models are going to be deeply impactful, therefore we want to make sure that we bring in more expertise in how to use the technology so that we can be at the forefront of using these tools.”

“New technologies don’t come along perfectly formed, you have to work with them and you have to learn how to work with them,” he continued. “So we want to find someone who can twin knowledge of the law with deep knowledge and expertise of these models.”

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Popular essay plagiarism software Turnitin is working on a new tool to detect if students have used AI bots like ChatGPT.

Turnitin is a plagiarism detection service commonly used by universties, including law schools. Their software produces a percentage score identifying similarities with existing sources.

The recent boom in AI chatbots has triggered the company to start its own AI Innovation Lab in a bid to outsmart the bots and detect the use of AI writing tools.

In a recent YouTube video, Turnitin developer David Adamson demonstrated how the new software will work. After inputing an essay written by ChatGPT and edited by himself, the system calculated that 50% of the essay was produced by AI, even identifying that 22 of the 43 sentences were not of human origin.

While the tool is still in the testing phase the team is hoping it will be ready soon.

“Our model has been trained specifically on academic writing sourced from a comprehensive database, as opposed to solely publicly available content,” explained Turnitin’s chief product officer, Annie Chechitelli, in a blog post. “As a result, Turnitin is more tuned to finding instances of potential dishonesty in student assignments,”

CEO Chris Caren added that while the company’s current products already offer some level of AI detection, more would be needed in the future. “We will incorporate our latest AI writing detection capabilities — including those that recognize ChatGPT writing — into our in-market products for educator use in 2023,” he said.

The issue of AI-based cheating is a hot topic at the moment, with many universities reassessing their rules concerning assessments. Legal Cheek recently reported concerns from a top barrister that students cheating with ChatGPT could damage degree credibility.

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What is thought to be the first AI-assisted legal decision has been published by a judge in Colombia.

Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia says he used the tool to assist him in solving a dispute between a health insurance company and the guardian of an autistic child. The case concerns whether the child is covered for medical treatment.

Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, apparently employed the chatbot to ask legal questions and included its full responses in his ruling alongside his own thoughts, which have been translated from Spanish:

“The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI), accordingly, we entered parts of the legal questions posed in these proceedings.”

He emphasised that any information put forward by the bot gets fully fact-checked and the purpose is to assist and speed up the process — not to replace judiciary expertise.

The AI was asked questions including: “Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?” and “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favourable decisions in similar cases?”

Currently, this sort of practice is allowed within Columbian law, but there are concerns that these types of systems can give biased responses based on the datasets they are trained on.

The news follows a flurry of recent activity around the AI tool, with one US professor claiming that it should be taught to students as a legal research tool alongside LexisNexis and Westlaw. What’s more, we’ve learnt that ChatGPT can write poetry and successfully answer questions on the Watson Glaser test.

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ChatGPT has been making headlines across the world.

Legal Cheek even got in on the action, putting the AI chatbot through the Watson Glaser test and getting it to answer training contract interview questions.

For its next big challenge, we asked the system to construct a poem exploring the ups and downs of life as a law student. Here’s what it came up with….

Why not give it a go for yourself here, and post the results in the comments.

The post We asked ChatGPT to write a poem about life as a law student appeared first on Legal Cheek.

Aspiring lawyers should learn how to use artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT during their time at law school, a leading law professor has suggested.

Andrew Perlman, dean of Suffolk University Law School in the US, has advocated for the use of the headline-grabbing AI as a means of legal research and writing alongside popular tools such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.

“We’re at a very interesting inflection point,” Perlman told Reuters. “It would not surprise me if professionals of the future will be expected to make queries to chatbots and other tools to at least get an initial draft of a document.”

ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022, and uses AI to interact in a conversational way and respond to questions.

According to Perlman, law professors may in the future require students to disclose the technology used in their work. “Given how rapidly the technology seems to be progressing, these are conversations that are going to have to happen sooner rather than later,” he said.

In contrast, Legal Cheek recently spoke to barrister Daniel Sokol, who voiced concerns that ChatGPT could lure students into cheating in online exams. “For law students, ChatGPT and other AI modules would be most helpful for essays and dissertations and less useful for problem questions and multiple choice exams based on particular scenarios,” he said.

Last month we used ChatGPT to pass the Watson Glaser test after a student contacted us claiming they had used the bot to score 70% on a mock version of the test.

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A barrister who represents students accused of cheating has shared his concerns surrounding online exams, and suggested binning them altogether.

In a recent opinion piece, Daniel Sokol, a barrister at 12 King’s Bench Walk, offers his perspective on the transition to online exams amidst the pandemic, saying the number of queries he’s received has increased.

After hearing about the prevalence of cheating from his clients, he conducted a survey of 900 university students across the UK. As many as one in six students confessed to cheating in online assessments this academic year, whilst more than half claimed to know someone who had cheated.

Sokol’s survey further found that 79% of students believed it was easier to cheat in online exams than in the traditional in-person format.

Popular methods of cheating reported included contacting friends and family or using a search engine on a separate device. Sokol suggests the increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms like ChatGPT may provide another method for students to cheat.

He tested the viability of this theory by asking ChatGPT to provide a 100-word answer to a question. The chatbot responded with what former university lecturer Sokol judged to be a “decent effort, produced in seconds” and “sufficient to obtain a low 2:1”.

When probed further by Legal Cheek and whether this problem is particularly relevant for law exams, Sokol told us: “For law students, ChatGPT and other AI modules would be most helpful for essays and dissertations and less useful for problem questions and multiple choice exams based on particular scenarios.”

Whether this will push universities to return to in-person examinations is unclear but this new technology may drive them to increase monitoring for online exams. “Law schools need to convey to students what is and is not permissible with regards to the use of AI in assessments,” says Sokol. He gives the example of an essay question asking about the problems with a fault system of accident compensation and the case for reform. “Can a student put the question to ChatGPT and use the response as a starting point for their answer? Does that constitute academic misconduct? Does that depend on the nature and the degree of change from the original AI response?”

Sokol advises caution to any students tempted to use AI in their assessments, warning them to “ask academic staff, in advance and in writing, about the rules on this issue to avoid inadvertent (and potentially career-altering) breaches of academic integrity”.

He also suggests in his article that universities conduct all important assessments in-person as “that is the only way to maintain standards and reassure employers and others that a candidate’s degree was obtained honestly”. He adds:

“It is now too easy to cheat in online exams and too many students are currently doing so, undetected. This trend will only worsen with the development of AI. Sometimes, old-fashioned methods are the best.”

This is not the first time ChatGPT has made the news. In a recent exclusive by Legal Cheek, one student demonstrated that it could successfully answer questions on the Watson Glaser test.

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