"Artificial Intelligence" Ethics for Attorneys

We have enjoyed law practice automation for more than half a century, from early keyword searches of cases manually entered into databases to semi-automatic assembly of common contract clauses to expert-seeded predictive coding for the screening of documents for production in discovery. Since November 2022, the availability of apps using GPT, Claude and other “large language models” (LLMs) to generate proposals of human-sounding text applying patterns found among billions of words of training text has attracted hundreds of millions of users. These users include attorneys, a few of whom have been famously called out by courts for filing papers with machine-generated, “fake” case citations or arguments.

 

Some courts and bar organizations early announced rules to address clearly inappropriate uses of generative “artificial intelligence.” However, as these technologies are deployed at various scales from individual clients and practitioners with smartphone apps to mega-firms with in-house models, the economics of what is “good enough” add to the challenges of practicing ethically.

 

Ethics issues in law practice automation, such as confidentiality, have been amplified by GenAI through embedding and much enhanced retrievability that were not considered in the “proportionality” rules established just a few years ago. Availability through web services (with dizzying terms and conditions) of foundation LLMs trained with information “scraped” from public-facing sources to which creators and individuals may raise proprietary or privacy claims—often customized or “fine-tuned”—leave tool providers, attorneys, and clients with limited ability to identify, much less resolve those issues.

 

Attorneys attending this program learn from practitioners who have been involved in policy development and consideration of the implications of novel technologies on the Rules of Professional Responsibility, to help meet their ethical responsibilities.