AI Can Write the Legal Summaries Most Lawyers and Law Firms Put Up on the Net
Dave Winer, as far as I am concerned, the inventor of blogging and podcasting, shared yesterday: “Someday they will have AI actors delivering the nightly news and no one will notice.”
The first thing I thought of when I read that was the legal content and legalese writing that comes out of most lawyers and law firms for marketing purposes. In the case of smaller law firms, a lot of it is just content marketing written by people other than lawyers, often marketing professionals themselves.
In many large and medium law firms, I hate to say it, a lot of the content just appears to be legal summaries coming from cases, regulations, and whatnot, often in the names of two, three, or four lawyers, as if it would actually take that many to write a case summary. You could have a law student do those summaries, or even AI, since it can summarize developments in case law or regulations.
What AI can’t do, though, is provide real insight and commentary in a conversational tone that’s engaging, something that builds trust with readers. That tends to come from someone with a history of speaking in a certain way, a personal approach in explaining things.
One blogger I interviewed a couple of weeks ago described it like I do. It’s like getting together with someone at the corner of a bar and explaining a legal concept over a beer. Maybe they ask you a question. You’re using your own tone, listening to their questions, establishing trust. You might reference situations you’ve been involved in—obviously without breaching confidences—and doing it in a more storytelling way.
Sure, AI can research cases and summarize codes for legal bloggers and publishers, and that’s great. AI can even have that material ready for you as you blog or publish online. But that’s not the real publishing. It’s not the real engaging, insightful, and caring commentary that you can provide and have the obligation to provide as a lawyer.
AI will get close someday, but I don’t think it will get all the way there.
The scary part for law firms, at least it would be for me, do you really want to be a lawyer or a law firm that’s just putting out AI-generated content with you listed as the writer or author? Because you’re essentially saying, “We don’t need lawyers writing content summarizing the law for people anymore.” You’re admitting that the legal summaries you’ve been publishing were only ever meant to garner traffic or analytics and improve search rankings—so now AI can just do it for me and the firm
I think that’s less than we should expect of ourselves as lawyers and other professionals working at law firms.