How often do you use AI in your job?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a lawyer what is the best AI tool for summarizing video meetings without creating privileged issues? That I think would actually be useful but not sure safe to adopt given the data issues.

Any LLM can summarize a meeting transcript.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work with PII as a government attorney. Absolutely not permitted to feed that into AI. So never.

So you are naturally a scared person …

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

Np also a lawyer who has barely used ai. Our admin people are being encouraged to use it, I can see it would be helpful for them. Lawyers by and large are not for the reasons mentioned on this thread.

Lawyers on dcum typically are the best of the best lawyers - we graduated top of our top law schools and trained in some of the most demanding work places in the US. People like to shit on lawyers and say book smart doesn’t mean smart, but reality is that to be an attorney in my firm you need to be exceptionally bright, hard working, productive and good at stuff. You just didn’t get through college and law school with top grades without being so.

With that background, all the things you list…. I do perfectly and efficiently the first time. Other people on this thread saying it takes them “a quick” twenty mins to draft a very short email? My short emails take 2-3 mins and while I concede may have a minor typo, their tone and content is flawless. That’s why my clients pay me $2000 an hour. I need to be able to send that kind of client product for 10 hours a day in near consistent quality. I can produce the email, structure the excel, draft the article, etc in perfect form the first time in the same time it would take me to input the information in ai. Certainly less time than it would take me to review and edit the ai output. And the ai output is likely to be just not as good as what I can do. If I could not do it that well and that quickly the first time, I would have been pushed out of biglaw a long time ago.

I have friends in regular non legal jobs and their jobs are just less demanding. The hours and deadlines are less demanding and the work output is less demanding. My dh is a non lawyer (and very bright and very successful) but he may spend all day just debating a draft email he needs to send to the ceo, and he can get away with that in his job. I could see how ai might add value in that context (although even then, the reason why dh makes seven figures for a job where his only task in a day is writing an email is because he is damn good at communication and very well liked, so the times we’ve put his emails thru ai we’ve been very disappointed with the output because it no longer sounded like him).

You say your emails take 2-3 minutes… why would I pay you $2000 if an AI and a “less smart” person will soon also take 2-3 minutes to do the same thing? You’re the one in the most danger.

Not the PP you’re quoting but this is a very dumb takeaway. Those 2-3 minute emails are not the core of our job. It’s the writing and research and analysis that AI can’t do. The email is a short summary or update of the real work that AI can’t do.

Of course it can’t do your job (yet). But what if it can do 20% of your job? 40? 60? When do you get devalued?

Here is the reality. The top flight lawyers in this thread are creating exactly the content AI is training on to TRY to SOUND like us. Not to actually reason or analyze like us. To SOUND like it is. It’s not even coming close to the actual work. It’s just rhetorical cosplay. Looks like the real thing at first glance, but is useless garbage on closer review.

You are anthropomorphizing the AI the same way its boosters would. It’s not a person. It’s not a dumb assistant who is never going to be as smart as you. It is a program that converts words to numbers and gets a statistical approximation for the next word. It doesn’t ever need to be as good as you. It needs to be close, and for a person who is cheaper than you to get the rest of the way there.

No, I’m not. I’m describing how it works. It trains on the kind of work we do, to sound like we sound. Not to do the work we do, but to sound like it did. If you think my work is to *sound* like a lawyer, you misunderstand the task.

Years ago, people insisted that software would never be able to provide accurate translation in real time. Today I was in a cab in Athens communicating with the Greek driver via translate apps on our phone.

Ignore what is happening at your own peril.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

At least at my law firm, we have an AI Taskforce and there are very clear rules about us giving AI attorney-client privileged information. So we couldn't feed AI a transcript to create notes or minutes, we can't feed it text about our clients, etc. And to get hired at my firm you have to submit a writing sample so every attorney CAN write.

Lol. task force = group of people who accomplish nothing.

You know you can tailor AI tools so that your info is confidential and won’t be shared with other users. All of the agreements my co has with AI vendors have ‘no training’ and confidentiality and security terms with robust back stops.

Your firm is going to fall behind

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

my assessment is that it can take substandard product and get it to plausible-sounding mediocrity pretty quickly.

so if you're someone who needed to be coaxed through picking a topic and then creating an outline and refining the outline and then eventually writing a paper over several weeks of high school or college— i can see how AI might seem miraculous.

but the effort i have put into actually refining the results of AI is generally more than I would put into just... writing in the first place. i'm happy that you've found a tool that helps you.

If you are spending extensive time refining drafts that AI produces, you simply don’t understand how to use the tool or generate appropriate prompts. This is like saying a screwdriver is faulty because you are using a flathead when you actually needed a Phillips. It’s a tool and if other people are making use of it and you can’t, it’s not because you are more skilled. It’s because you don’t know how to use the tool.

Lawyer here who uses AI a great deal but I struggle at times with needing to refine the output. Do you have any tips or tricks?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm also a lawyer and have seen the results of AI work and seen Lexis demos and it's absolutely not there.

The hallucinations are still a major problem of course.

You are missing out and don’t even know it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm also a lawyer and have seen the results of AI work and seen Lexis demos and it's absolutely not there.

The hallucinations are still a major problem of course.

You are missing out and don’t even know it

DP. I went to a training on the different AI legal research tools and the presenter told us flat-out to never put the results into our briefs - they are for "idea generation" only - and that the only way to deal with hallucination is to not use the product in any of my real output.

There are some legal research situations where idea generation is helpful, but those are not worth the amount of time and money people are pouring into AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

my assessment is that it can take substandard product and get it to plausible-sounding mediocrity pretty quickly.

so if you're someone who needed to be coaxed through picking a topic and then creating an outline and refining the outline and then eventually writing a paper over several weeks of high school or college— i can see how AI might seem miraculous.

but the effort i have put into actually refining the results of AI is generally more than I would put into just... writing in the first place. i'm happy that you've found a tool that helps you.

If you are spending extensive time refining drafts that AI produces, you simply don’t understand how to use the tool or generate appropriate prompts. This is like saying a screwdriver is faulty because you are using a flathead when you actually needed a Phillips. It’s a tool and if other people are making use of it and you can’t, it’s not because you are more skilled. It’s because you don’t know how to use the tool.

Lawyer here who uses AI a great deal but I struggle at times with needing to refine the output. Do you have any tips or tricks?

The most important thing is to break it down so that long input -> short output. So for example let's say you want a summary of a 100 page pdf. You would be better off splitting up the pdf into separate documents and asking for summaries of each section. There are complicated software related reasons for this. The software struggles when it's asked to analyze lots of separate tokens or has to answer multiple questions at once.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

Np also a lawyer who has barely used ai. Our admin people are being encouraged to use it, I can see it would be helpful for them. Lawyers by and large are not for the reasons mentioned on this thread.

Lawyers on dcum typically are the best of the best lawyers - we graduated top of our top law schools and trained in some of the most demanding work places in the US. People like to shit on lawyers and say book smart doesn’t mean smart, but reality is that to be an attorney in my firm you need to be exceptionally bright, hard working, productive and good at stuff. You just didn’t get through college and law school with top grades without being so.

With that background, all the things you list…. I do perfectly and efficiently the first time. Other people on this thread saying it takes them “a quick” twenty mins to draft a very short email? My short emails take 2-3 mins and while I concede may have a minor typo, their tone and content is flawless. That’s why my clients pay me $2000 an hour. I need to be able to send that kind of client product for 10 hours a day in near consistent quality. I can produce the email, structure the excel, draft the article, etc in perfect form the first time in the same time it would take me to input the information in ai. Certainly less time than it would take me to review and edit the ai output. And the ai output is likely to be just not as good as what I can do. If I could not do it that well and that quickly the first time, I would have been pushed out of biglaw a long time ago.

I have friends in regular non legal jobs and their jobs are just less demanding. The hours and deadlines are less demanding and the work output is less demanding. My dh is a non lawyer (and very bright and very successful) but he may spend all day just debating a draft email he needs to send to the ceo, and he can get away with that in his job. I could see how ai might add value in that context (although even then, the reason why dh makes seven figures for a job where his only task in a day is writing an email is because he is damn good at communication and very well liked, so the times we’ve put his emails thru ai we’ve been very disappointed with the output because it no longer sounded like him).

In house Lawyer here (and definitely not the best and the brightest like you, I couldn’t hack big law). I think you are off the mark here, and your business will suffer if you don’t move towards progress. Your hubris is getting in the way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a lawyer what is the best AI tool for summarizing video meetings without creating privileged issues? That I think would actually be useful but not sure safe to adopt given the data issues.

Your firm needs to invest in an enterprise edition of the software that will not send data back to the company for training.

It's software. It can be the equivalent of Microsoft Word. You don't worry about your data being sent to Microsoft when you write a document on word.

You might if it's backing up to the cloud. Everything depends on the license.
PP's question needs to be directed to their firm, or if self-employed they need to spend some time understanding how these work on the back end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

my assessment is that it can take substandard product and get it to plausible-sounding mediocrity pretty quickly.

so if you're someone who needed to be coaxed through picking a topic and then creating an outline and refining the outline and then eventually writing a paper over several weeks of high school or college— i can see how AI might seem miraculous.

but the effort i have put into actually refining the results of AI is generally more than I would put into just... writing in the first place. i'm happy that you've found a tool that helps you.

If you are spending extensive time refining drafts that AI produces, you simply don’t understand how to use the tool or generate appropriate prompts. This is like saying a screwdriver is faulty because you are using a flathead when you actually needed a Phillips. It’s a tool and if other people are making use of it and you can’t, it’s not because you are more skilled. It’s because you don’t know how to use the tool.

Lawyer here who uses AI a great deal but I struggle at times with needing to refine the output. Do you have any tips or tricks?

The most important thing is to break it down so that long input -> short output. So for example let's say you want a summary of a 100 page pdf. You would be better off splitting up the pdf into separate documents and asking for summaries of each section. There are complicated software related reasons for this. The software struggles when it's asked to analyze lots of separate tokens or has to answer multiple questions at once.

Aha I see that. I’ll get a really good analysis for one thing and then it breaks down over something else. My other frustration with Chat is that it gives a confident answer when it’s 100% wrong or guessing or hallucinating

Have you found any prompts for that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a lawyer what is the best AI tool for summarizing video meetings without creating privileged issues? That I think would actually be useful but not sure safe to adopt given the data issues.

Your firm needs to invest in an enterprise edition of the software that will not send data back to the company for training.

It's software. It can be the equivalent of Microsoft Word. You don't worry about your data being sent to Microsoft when you write a document on word.

You might if it's backing up to the cloud. Everything depends on the license.
PP's question needs to be directed to their firm, or if self-employed they need to spend some time understanding how these work on the back end.

Everything is cloud based now

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm also a lawyer and have seen the results of AI work and seen Lexis demos and it's absolutely not there.

The hallucinations are still a major problem of course.

You are missing out and don’t even know it

DP. I went to a training on the different AI legal research tools and the presenter told us flat-out to never put the results into our briefs - they are for "idea generation" only - and that the only way to deal with hallucination is to not use the product in any of my real output.

There are some legal research situations where idea generation is helpful, but those are not worth the amount of time and money people are pouring into AI.

I am a lawyer in a field where AI is essential or else my company will be left behind. We are using it in many ways, both back end and front end. The capabilities are enormous.

Sorry, but these presenters aren’t the last word on AI. If you’re using AI in a public facing doc, of course you need to carefully check all citations, AI is known to hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean you walk away from a tool like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

Np also a lawyer who has barely used ai. Our admin people are being encouraged to use it, I can see it would be helpful for them. Lawyers by and large are not for the reasons mentioned on this thread.

Lawyers on dcum typically are the best of the best lawyers - we graduated top of our top law schools and trained in some of the most demanding work places in the US. People like to shit on lawyers and say book smart doesn’t mean smart, but reality is that to be an attorney in my firm you need to be exceptionally bright, hard working, productive and good at stuff. You just didn’t get through college and law school with top grades without being so.

With that background, all the things you list…. I do perfectly and efficiently the first time. Other people on this thread saying it takes them “a quick” twenty mins to draft a very short email? My short emails take 2-3 mins and while I concede may have a minor typo, their tone and content is flawless. That’s why my clients pay me $2000 an hour. I need to be able to send that kind of client product for 10 hours a day in near consistent quality. I can produce the email, structure the excel, draft the article, etc in perfect form the first time in the same time it would take me to input the information in ai. Certainly less time than it would take me to review and edit the ai output. And the ai output is likely to be just not as good as what I can do. If I could not do it that well and that quickly the first time, I would have been pushed out of biglaw a long time ago.

I have friends in regular non legal jobs and their jobs are just less demanding. The hours and deadlines are less demanding and the work output is less demanding. My dh is a non lawyer (and very bright and very successful) but he may spend all day just debating a draft email he needs to send to the ceo, and he can get away with that in his job. I could see how ai might add value in that context (although even then, the reason why dh makes seven figures for a job where his only task in a day is writing an email is because he is damn good at communication and very well liked, so the times we’ve put his emails thru ai we’ve been very disappointed with the output because it no longer sounded like him).

You say your emails take 2-3 minutes… why would I pay you $2000 if an AI and a “less smart” person will soon also take 2-3 minutes to do the same thing? You’re the one in the most danger.

Not the PP you’re quoting but this is a very dumb takeaway. Those 2-3 minute emails are not the core of our job. It’s the writing and research and analysis that AI can’t do. The email is a short summary or update of the real work that AI can’t do.

Of course it can’t do your job (yet). But what if it can do 20% of your job? 40? 60? When do you get devalued?

Here is the reality. The top flight lawyers in this thread are creating exactly the content AI is training on to TRY to SOUND like us. Not to actually reason or analyze like us. To SOUND like it is. It’s not even coming close to the actual work. It’s just rhetorical cosplay. Looks like the real thing at first glance, but is useless garbage on closer review.

You are anthropomorphizing the AI the same way its boosters would. It’s not a person. It’s not a dumb assistant who is never going to be as smart as you. It is a program that converts words to numbers and gets a statistical approximation for the next word. It doesn’t ever need to be as good as you. It needs to be close, and for a person who is cheaper than you to get the rest of the way there.

No, I’m not. I’m describing how it works. It trains on the kind of work we do, to sound like we sound. Not to do the work we do, but to sound like it did. If you think my work is to *sound* like a lawyer, you misunderstand the task.

Years ago, people insisted that software would never be able to provide accurate translation in real time. Today I was in a cab in Athens communicating with the Greek driver via translate apps on our phone.

Ignore what is happening at your own peril.

This.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lawyer- I use it to help me re write emails. It helps with my tone. I’m female and have always struggled with being too nice and taking on too much work. And then I swung to being too rude in emails. AI gives a good balanced middle tone.

The lawyers in this thread who are being so negative about AI simply don’t understand how vast it can be in its uses. It is such an awesome tool even if it can’t do a “legal” analysis. It can do the first draft of something like a blog post, it can create meeting minutes from a transcript, it can create detailed notes from a transcript, it can create a full PowerPoint presentation from a compliance document, it can help turn text into tables and develop databases, it can help create really advanced excel tools to do analyses, it can teach you how to create advanced templates. It’s amazing.

Np also a lawyer who has barely used ai. Our admin people are being encouraged to use it, I can see it would be helpful for them. Lawyers by and large are not for the reasons mentioned on this thread.

Lawyers on dcum typically are the best of the best lawyers - we graduated top of our top law schools and trained in some of the most demanding work places in the US. People like to shit on lawyers and say book smart doesn’t mean smart, but reality is that to be an attorney in my firm you need to be exceptionally bright, hard working, productive and good at stuff. You just didn’t get through college and law school with top grades without being so.

With that background, all the things you list…. I do perfectly and efficiently the first time. Other people on this thread saying it takes them “a quick” twenty mins to draft a very short email? My short emails take 2-3 mins and while I concede may have a minor typo, their tone and content is flawless. That’s why my clients pay me $2000 an hour. I need to be able to send that kind of client product for 10 hours a day in near consistent quality. I can produce the email, structure the excel, draft the article, etc in perfect form the first time in the same time it would take me to input the information in ai. Certainly less time than it would take me to review and edit the ai output. And the ai output is likely to be just not as good as what I can do. If I could not do it that well and that quickly the first time, I would have been pushed out of biglaw a long time ago.

I have friends in regular non legal jobs and their jobs are just less demanding. The hours and deadlines are less demanding and the work output is less demanding. My dh is a non lawyer (and very bright and very successful) but he may spend all day just debating a draft email he needs to send to the ceo, and he can get away with that in his job. I could see how ai might add value in that context (although even then, the reason why dh makes seven figures for a job where his only task in a day is writing an email is because he is damn good at communication and very well liked, so the times we’ve put his emails thru ai we’ve been very disappointed with the output because it no longer sounded like him).

You say your emails take 2-3 minutes… why would I pay you $2000 if an AI and a “less smart” person will soon also take 2-3 minutes to do the same thing? You’re the one in the most danger.

Not the PP you’re quoting but this is a very dumb takeaway. Those 2-3 minute emails are not the core of our job. It’s the writing and research and analysis that AI can’t do. The email is a short summary or update of the real work that AI can’t do.

Of course it can’t do your job (yet). But what if it can do 20% of your job? 40? 60? When do you get devalued?

Here is the reality. The top flight lawyers in this thread are creating exactly the content AI is training on to TRY to SOUND like us. Not to actually reason or analyze like us. To SOUND like it is. It’s not even coming close to the actual work. It’s just rhetorical cosplay. Looks like the real thing at first glance, but is useless garbage on closer review.

You are anthropomorphizing the AI the same way its boosters would. It’s not a person. It’s not a dumb assistant who is never going to be as smart as you. It is a program that converts words to numbers and gets a statistical approximation for the next word. It doesn’t ever need to be as good as you. It needs to be close, and for a person who is cheaper than you to get the rest of the way there.

No, I’m not. I’m describing how it works. It trains on the kind of work we do, to sound like we sound. Not to do the work we do, but to sound like it did. If you think my work is to *sound* like a lawyer, you misunderstand the task.

Years ago, people insisted that software would never be able to provide accurate translation in real time. Today I was in a cab in Athens communicating with the Greek driver via translate apps on our phone.

Ignore what is happening at your own peril.

Look. I wish it did what people say it does. I’m GC at a tiny nonprofit. If it did even 10% of what people claim, I’d be thrilled! And if it ever does get to the point it can replace a team of lawyers, I’ll be ruling the world! But as it stands currently it’s literally useless to me. I don’t need help “summarizing a long email” as someone upthread said. I don’t need window dressing or help changing the tone of my writing. I need major substantive legal analysis and strategy.