Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:58
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:51
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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).
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:49
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
It’s this. It can get you to a minimally viable solution very quickly.
The problem is that in many cases all you need IS a minimally viable solution, and we’ve also been trained by corporations for many years to accept minimally viable solutions and move on (fast fashion, planned obsolescence, etc)
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:44
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:I’ve tried but it’s usually wrong. I am an accountant.
AI has been doing a pretty good job for me fishing in the notes to financial statements of competitors. It alerts me to certain things, so instead of reading hundreds of pages, I need to check 40-50 bullet points.
In general, it’s great at many tasks that are nice to have, but not so much in must haves, so it increases my efficiency but will not replace me yet.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:34
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:I use it all of the time. I work in a newsroom and it is helpful for getting me started on headlines and social language.
I am a journalist and I never use it at work for anything publishable.
I use it at home in my personal life in researching various questions.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:33
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Almost never. I’m a lawyer and all my experiences with it have been bad. The only exception is to get a non-client writing project started (like an alert for the firm blog). It can help break through writers block.
+1. AI gets so many things wrong that it’s a complete waste of my time. As for email tone, I already know how to adjust my tone to fit my audience. That’s my job.
You need a new job then, AI is coming for that!
Knowing how to adjust your tone is no longer a marketable skill.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:33
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
I’m a project manager for tech projects at a bank. My company subscribes and encourages us to use it. We’ve had it since April.
For now, we record our meetings and AI summarizes with key points, action items lists and next steps. Ai is built into our performance review logging system - we add simple sentences and it creates a professionally written summary. I also use it to refine my emails. I used to stress about wording and tone, where a quick email would take me 20 min to write and I’m still second-guessing after it’s sent. Now I can just write out my thoughts and facts, and AI can make it more or less casual/professional, more collaborative, more concise, etc. This is the biggest time saver and stress reliever for me. It’s like my assistant.
All employees are getting Pro version Subscriptions in a few weeks and company has optional training sessions for us to learn how it can help with productivity - summarizing long emails, creating a to do list, scanning our messages platform and producing a list of everyone you’re waiting for something from, etc.
For now, we record our meetings and AI summarizes with key points, action items lists and next steps. Ai is built into our performance review logging system - we add simple sentences and it creates a professionally written summary. I also use it to refine my emails. I used to stress about wording and tone, where a quick email would take me 20 min to write and I’m still second-guessing after it’s sent. Now I can just write out my thoughts and facts, and AI can make it more or less casual/professional, more collaborative, more concise, etc. This is the biggest time saver and stress reliever for me. It’s like my assistant.
All employees are getting Pro version Subscriptions in a few weeks and company has optional training sessions for us to learn how it can help with productivity - summarizing long emails, creating a to do list, scanning our messages platform and producing a list of everyone you’re waiting for something from, etc.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:26
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Almost never. I’m a lawyer and all my experiences with it have been bad. The only exception is to get a non-client writing project started (like an alert for the firm blog). It can help break through writers block.
+1. AI gets so many things wrong that it’s a complete waste of my time. As for email tone, I already know how to adjust my tone to fit my audience. That’s my job.
Everyone THINKS they are great at this- like everyone THINKS they are great drivers. I’m sure YOU are wonderful. It’s the other 99% that are bad but think they are good that I’m talking about.
This is meaningless. If I look at two emails, one I wrote and one AI wrote, and I prefer the tone in the one I wrote ... then that's the tone I intended. If you dislike my tone, that problem is not solved by AI drafting an email that I edit back to what I meant to say. - DP
If I were you I'd keep that one that you like, next time you need to write an email put your bullet points in, put your original email in and say write the bullet points to match this tone.
But why?
Even assuming I wanted to use the same tone and framing (different situations are different), coming up with the first one was quick. I just wrote it, I didn't agonize over it.
If I wanted a nearly exact copy, like in a weekly report, I would just copy paste. Going through AI is an unnecessary third step.
In this scenario the most useful thing AI could do is provide a better search function in Outlook. If it can do that, great: I will use it. Haven't seen that in my org yet.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:15
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
I don't need to do any of those tasks.
There are actual uses for AI in law, but they are narrow and not usually core legal work (e.g., you don't have to be a lawyer to summarize a transcript). The insistence that we find ways to use it is annoying. It's like insisting I use a screwdriver to cook dinner, and saying I'm the problem if I can't figure out how that would be useful. And then simultaneously saying screwdrivers will replace chefs.
As someone else said, useful tools get used. If your customers don't think it's useful, the problem isn't the customer.
Sometimes I *do* need a transcript summarized but I need to be sure the summary accurately identifies the most important admissions. And it just… doesn’t.
The biggest problem is that AI tells you want to hear. So if you tell it “summarize transcript while being sure to include any admissions addressing Key Issue Y” it will exaggerate and embellish the draft to hallucinate more details on Issue Y than are really there.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:13
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
The hallucinations are still a major problem of course.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:12
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
Same.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:11
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
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.
This is only helpful if the result is error-free work. Since it isn’t, I have to spend as much time looking for the mistakes as it would have taken for me to do it correctly.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:08
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Almost never. I’m a lawyer and all my experiences with it have been bad. The only exception is to get a non-client writing project started (like an alert for the firm blog). It can help break through writers block.
+1. AI gets so many things wrong that it’s a complete waste of my time. As for email tone, I already know how to adjust my tone to fit my audience. That’s my job.
Everyone THINKS they are great at this- like everyone THINKS they are great drivers. I’m sure YOU are wonderful. It’s the other 99% that are bad but think they are good that I’m talking about.
This is meaningless. If I look at two emails, one I wrote and one AI wrote, and I prefer the tone in the one I wrote ... then that's the tone I intended. If you dislike my tone, that problem is not solved by AI drafting an email that I edit back to what I meant to say. - DP
If I were you I'd keep that one that you like, next time you need to write an email put your bullet points in, put your original email in and say write the bullet points to match this tone.
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:07
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Almost never. I’m a lawyer and all my experiences with it have been bad. The only exception is to get a non-client writing project started (like an alert for the firm blog). It can help break through writers block.
+1. AI gets so many things wrong that it’s a complete waste of my time. As for email tone, I already know how to adjust my tone to fit my audience. That’s my job.
Everyone THINKS they are great at this- like everyone THINKS they are great drivers. I’m sure YOU are wonderful. It’s the other 99% that are bad but think they are good that I’m talking about.
This is meaningless. If I look at two emails, one I wrote and one AI wrote, and I prefer the tone in the one I wrote ... then that's the tone I intended. If you dislike my tone, that problem is not solved by AI drafting an email that I edit back to what I meant to say. - DP
Anonymous
10/05/2025 08:04
Subject: How often do you use AI in your job?
Zero. Clients need facts, not some AI hallucination.