Top 10 Prompts for Legal Professionals
by Wonju Lee on Sep 7th, 2023
Over the past ten weeks, we’ve explored the applications of AI in the legal field and dove into the specifics of how one may leverage AI tools to expedite and streamline legal work.
AI will continue reshaping industries and open new doors in legal work, transforming how legal professionals handle their work. Staying updated and informed in this technological revolution is of utmost importance. To that end, here are 10 useful prompts one may use on generative AI tools for legal work.
1. Summarization of Legal Work
The prompt showcases generative AI's usage in text summarization. By instructing the AI to provide a concise summary of legal topics, legal professionals can efficiently access general summaries and critical insights. The resulting summary condenses complex legal information and serves as an informative overview of the legal text. This presents how generative AI can simplify legal text summarization processes and offer practitioners a valuable tool for accurately and efficiently extracting vital information to make well-informed decisions.
The provided prompt is designed for legal professionals seeking to optimize text analysis with AI. By instructing the AI to examine a specific legal document pertaining to a particular case or topic, the prompt guides users to obtain a comprehensive overview of essential arguments, relevant statutes, and recent legal precedents. Furthermore, it facilitates identifying potential areas of ambiguity or dispute within the document, equipping legal professionals with deeper insights into its implications for future legal proceedings or interpretations.
This legal research prompt enables legal professionals to conduct thorough and time-efficient research. Legal practitioners can request generative AI tools to analyze complex legal cases, summarize key arguments, dissect court decisions, and predict potential legal outcomes. The prompt showcases the capacity of AI to scan through vast legal databases, assisting lawyers and paralegals in crafting well-informed legal strategies.
This prompt demonstrates how one can harness AI’s capabilities to enhance the critical task of legal document proofreading and editing. Providing a clear directive to review, proofread, or edit a specific legal document highlights AI's capacity to meticulously examine lengthy documents, ensuring precision, coherence, and compliance with legal standards. Moreover, the prompt directs the AI tool to provide concrete suggestions for revisions to improve document clarity and legal validity. AI can efficiently assist legal professionals in perfecting documents for submission, reducing the risk of costly errors and enhancing overall efficiency in legal practice.
The provided prompt utilizes generative AI to assist legal professionals in the complex task of drafting legal contracts. Legal practitioners can expedite the contract creation process by simply inputting key details such as the type of contract, involved parties, specific terms, and desired compliance. Generative AI models can swiftly draft a comprehensive contract, encompassing all necessary clauses and legally binding language, ensuring accuracy and consistency. This not only saves a considerable amount of time but also minimizes the risk of human error, making it an invaluable resource for legal workers.
6. Trial Preparation and Practice
This prompt is a helpful tool for legal professionals seeking to enhance their trial preparation and practice. Specifying the case details and the client's interests enables the AI tool to generate a comprehensive trial strategy. Legal practitioners can expect detailed outlines of key arguments, exhibit suggestions, and witness examination plans. Furthermore, the prompt's emphasis on addressing potential counterarguments ensures thorough preparation. Through this prompt, legal professionals can save time, reduce errors, and craft winning strategies tailored to their client's needs while ensuring compliance with legal regulations.
7. Court filings and pleadings
The prompt can assist legal professionals in drafting court filings and pleadings. It focuses on creating a complaint for a plaintiff, ensuring adherence to legal standards, and including all necessary case details. Legal practitioners can gather essential information for a case and receive a well-structured initial document, saving valuable time and ensuring accuracy. Generative AI can serve as a valuable tool in streamlining the legal drafting process, allowing lawyers to focus on strategic aspects of their cases while maintaining high-quality documentation.
In legal estate planning, the assistance of generative AI proves invaluable. With this simple prompt, legal professionals can employ AI tools to accelerate the often complicated and time-consuming process of crafting comprehensive estate planning documents. This prompt ensures that the generated document aligns perfectly with the client's unique requirements by including placeholders for client details.
The provided prompt is designed to assist legal professionals in selecting the ideal AI tool for specific tasks within their legal practice. Users outline their task and tool requirements, such as compatibility with their preferred platform and the desired features or capabilities, and the AI responds with key factors and considerations when selecting a tool. By seeking legal AI tools that align with their specific needs, legal practitioners can streamline their workflow, enhance efficiency, and optimize their practice for improved client service and overall success.
Not all prompts need to be highly detailed and specific. This versatile prompt is an effective tool in the legal professional's arsenal, opening the door to various applications. By tailoring the prompt to a specific legal task or research topic, lawyers and paralegals can harness the capabilities of generative AI to receive valuable insights, analysis, and recommendations. It illustrates how AI can be a versatile assistant in the legal field, adapting to various needs and challenges.
Final Thoughts
As a final note ending this AI series on legal professionals, I want to address the question many practicing and aspiring legal practitioners face: Will AI replace legal professionals?
The recent introduction of Chat GPT on its GPT4 model demonstrated AI’s ability to take on human work with outstanding natural language processing capabilities. Several prominent law databases and legal tools incorporate AI technology, including Lawgeex and Westlaw, alongside the ever-popular ChatGPT, helping legal workers with legal documentation and research. AI has undoubtedly evolved as a powerful technology in law practice, as ChatGPT even passed the bar exam, scoring in the 90th percentile. It is already reported that law students use AI when drafting papers and studying for exams, while many legal professionals utilize AI assistant tools. In response to the AI revolution, Yale Law School created a course called “Artificial Intelligence, the Legal Profession, and Procedure,” to which Professor William Eskridge Jr. responded, “AI has already changed the practice of law” and “the structure of the legal profession.”
Amid AI’s rapid developments, some argue that the future of law will be run entirely by AI, establishing an ever-just legal system. Yet, that’s not quite the reality. AI will not fully replace legal workers, though it will transform the work process of legal professionals. AI can expertly execute legal work, including analyzing complex legal issues, reviewing documents, and generating legal content. In a Forbes article, Niels Martin Brochner, co-founder and CEO of Contractbook, claims that lawyers will “become hyper-augmented, which might turn them into overqualified project managers” and adds that “when the individual lawyer becomes more efficient, it should, in theory, mean that we will need fewer of them. Undoubtedly, AI will lead to fewer administrative tasks for legal professionals, resulting in job losses and business model shifts in the legal industry.
But in the grand scheme, AI will complement and streamline legal work rather than entirely replace legal professionals. Legal workers can shift their focus to more advanced and paramount tasks that involve creativity and abstract thinking abilities that AI tools lack. Furthermore, it is critical to select the right legal AI tool for particular tasks and learn “how to construct the right queries and evaluate the relevance, quality, and accuracy of the responses,” as John Villasenor claims. Thus, harnessing the potential of legal AI tools is twofold: utilizing the right tools to increase efficiency and finding complex tasks to work on with the extra time.
In short, AI will unlikely replace lawyers entirely; it will take some time to integrate into the legal landscape fully. Unresolved issues, including confidentiality, liability, and reliability in the legal field with the introduction of AI, will require attention and solutions. AI will give rise to social and cultural changes, where the business model of the legal industry will undergo significant changes. However, such a transformation is inevitable and will lead to a more affordable legal industry. Rather than fear and detest artificial intelligence, one should seek ways to utilize it effectively. Ultimately, it will come down to the man who best leverages this technology.
As the series comes to an end…
This article will wrap up our journey exploring how AI is and will continue to transform the legal landscape radically. I hope to share further insights in the future.