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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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). [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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?[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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. [/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

Your world is very small, and you need to open it. Wake up.

It is not 100 percent there on analysis and strategy, but it’s about 50+ % there in many areas. [/quote]

But it just isn’t. If this were true, orgs like mine and elite boutique law firms would already be stopping hiring associates and find themselves able to take on more cases. That’s not even close to what’s happening. I’m very plugged into all this. There are many of us who, as I say, are ready and willing to take on more work if these tools really were 50% of the way there. But they are really and truly garbage. They sound good on a surface level but produce trash you can’t use once you actually look closely. [/quote]

DP and I think your own assumptions are keeping you from appreciating the utility of the software.

First of all the media is the one insisting that AI is going to outright replace humans when we have all seen that LLMs are simply not capable of doing that.  They are just a tool.

That doesn’t mean they are “garbage.”  That is like saying that Google search is garbage because it can’t write a legal brief.

I will give you a simple example: our corporate version of westlaw gave us Cocounsel.  I had an annoying task where I had to look up a certain law for every state.  It was able to give me an easy link for that in 1 go.

No, that’s not writing for me but it is saving me time and it is “smarter” than the regular search function.  That’s enough to increase my personal productivity.  I’ve been able to find very specific clauses in documents using the Adobe AI search tool much faster than I ordinarily would because I can ask it for the meaning, not just the exact phrase.

I simply don’t understand how people are saying these tools are not helpful, not saving them time, etc.  If you experiment and are creative, the personal and professional uses seem so unlimited.  It’s the most genuine fun I have had at work in a long time.[/quote]

^ This is the kind of AI promotion that makes me frustrated and, frankly, suspicious. Why are you so invested in other people using this tool?

Other PPs have said they tried it and it's not helpful for their jobs. It's weird that the AI fans can't just accept that at face value. If PPs are wrong ... why do you care?

IME, the people who react like this to other people saying "no thanks" are either selling something, or really insecure in their choices and need the validation of "everybody's doing it" to paper over the problems with what they choose. [/quote]

Um… ok?  You can be as “suspicious” as you like.

I think you are reading way too much into an online discussion.  Someone is saying “this tool is useless.”  Someone else is saying “this tool is extremely useful for x, y, z,” and the response to that I am seeing is “I am too smart/highly paid for this to be useful for me.  It must be useful to you because all you do is drudgery.”  That’s wrong in addition to being rude, and it’s a very weak argument against a technology that is as transformative as AI has already proven itself to be.

The LLMs you dabble with at work are not all the AI around you- it’s already had profound impacts on medical applications, GPS, translation software, etc.  This is going to impact your career, whether you are in big law or government or the nonprofit sector.  I don’t actually care whether you believe that.  Time will tell us who is right.[/quote]

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