Introducing ChatGPT in Legal Industry

Background

In November 2022, a new artificial intelligence (“AI”) chatbot called ChatGPT was launched and aroused extensive attention worldwide. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can interact conversationally with users by offering detailed responses to any of users’ inquiries. Once user poses a question, ChatGPT will generate the answers detailly in paragraph forms. If users are not satisfied with the answers ChatGPT provided or the questions are not fully answered, the users can ask a follow-up question to get a clearer and more concise final answer.

These days, ChatGPT has been wildly used in different industries in their daily operations in particular the technology and education field. In addition, by the unique technology that ChatGPT processed, ChatGPT becomes a useful tool to be used in the
legal industry as it can help legal professions in various ways such as conducting researches and summarizing contents in order to spare more time to focus on providing legal services to clients.

 

Advantages of using ChatGPT in legal industry

With the vast database ChatGPT processed, it helps lawyers to conduct researches faster. Simply by typing a question, ChatGPT will gather information and provide answers which help lawyers get the answers faster without having to do any researches on their own. For instance, if a lawyer needs to conduct some legal researches for a case, he/she can simply input the research contents or keywords they look for in ChatGPT and the system will automatically gather the requested information and generate answer in paragraph form. This help lawyers to free up more manpower, time and energy to focus more on the legal work of the case.

ChatGPT also helps drafting documents. Every day, there are lots of emails and letters exchanges between lawyers, court, law firms and clients. Users can type a question asking ChatGPT to draft a letter for them with the outline set out, ChatGPT will help generate a letter accordingly in a short period of time. Lawyers do not have to build from scratch, this could save more time for them on dealing with tons of emails and letters exchanges every day. On the other hand, ChatGPT also helps with drafting legal documents. Although the draft may not be as perfect as a draft written by human, the outline and content can be developed, this could help lawyers free up more time and efforts on outlining, wherefore they can be more focus on the legal aspects of the cases they involved.

Besides legal work, law firms usually put miles effort on managing their website blogs or even LinkedIn pages in order to raise awareness and attention of more clients. It requires plenty of time for them to brainstorm blog topics and contents that can be fascinated enough to attract readers. ChatGPT can help in providing ideas for the blog topics, generate and provide a bunch of relevant authoritative studies, researches and up-to-date articles with citation for references. With ChatGPT, it can save a lot of time for legal professions on brainstorming appropriate topics, outlining blog post and finding credible sources for their blogs.

 

The possibility AI replacing legal profession

As AI technology have such a gross and systematic database, people may wonder if there will be a chance for them to replace a human expert like lawyer in the future. Although AI technology such as ChatGPT can reduce massive workload for lawyers which include conducting researches and drafting documents, they can only act as a role of assistant. As AI technology cannot give legal advices and clear guidance that a lawyer can provides based on his/her experiences and knowledges, human expert like lawyer is still required to enter the scene. Furthermore, AI technology cannot interpret law like lawyer can, they can only act as a source to help lawyers to gather and summarize information more efficiently.

 

Conclusion

With the implementation of ChatGPT in legal industry, from assisting blog posts to drafting emails and conducting legal researches, ChatGPT can improve the efficiency of a legal profession’s daily operations significantly and save more manpower, time and effort for legal professions to focus on providing legal services to clients.